Synopsis:

This is The Raid 2 as a standalone film. No bridging material to link this film to The Raid. No undercover police storyline. Just the story of a young man in prison who uses his fighting skills to join a family-run crime syndicate and rise through the ranks of the organisation. All the action sequences from the film are kept, with a pace much closer to the first Raid film.

Intentions:

I thought The Raid 2 was an excellent film, but as a sequel to The Raid it felt over-long and sometimes a bit cumbersome. I wanted to create a version of the second film that had the same manic pace and relentless energy of the first film, and set about seeing what I could cut from it.

Change List:

Version 1: - Added a new intro - the deleted "Politician's Son" scene in which Yuda is trying to get work. - Cut Andi's assassination by Bejo. - Cut all scenes from the opening 30 minutes linking back to The Raid or Bunawar's undercover group. - Cut Yuda shadowboxing in his prison cell. - Cut the meeting with the undercover cop to establish Yuda's identity. - Cut Yuda finding and removing the bug in his clothes. - Recut Bungan's meeting with Goto so that Uco and Yuda arrive as it is finishing. - Recut Yuda's meeting with Bungan to work with the undercover police storyline removed. - Cut Yuda calling Bunawar and his family. - Cut the Karaoke bar scene. - Cut Bungan meeting with Prakoso. - Cut Prakoso killing the young man. - Cut Bungan talking to Yuda while they dispose of bodies at the lake. - Recut Uco's meeting with Bejo to remove Yuda spying on them. - Cut Prakoso's meeting with his wife. - Cut the argument between Yuda and Uco after Prakoso's murder. - Trimmed the opening of the scene where corrupt police attack Yuda. - Trimmed and recut Yuda's phone conversation with Eka after being attacked by police. - Recut Yuda's conversation with Eka after the car chase to remove any discussion of being undercover police. - Removed Yuda's conversation with Bunawar prior to the warehouse raid. - Cut Uco's bathroom scene and discovery of the bug in his wallet. - Recut Uco's realisation of Bejo's plan and subsequent gunfight. - Removed Bunawar from epilogue. Version 2: - Removed "Politician's Son" opening. - Re-integraded the "Gang War" deleted scene at the appropriate point in the film.

Additional Notes:

v1: The editing was done using a Lagarith AVI and 6 WAV files in Sony Movie Studio 12. The main challenge was working with subtitles, which I achieved by creating an SRT file containing the subtitles for the film and burning this into the active video area of the Lagarith file using VirtualDub. I had to recreate my source a couple of times after realising that I needed to remove specific lines of dialogue at certain points. v2: The editing was done in Vegas Pro 14 using a Lagarith AVI and 4 WAV files. I was able to import my previous Movie Studio project into Vegas, but due to slight changes in the source file runtimes I still had to review almost every cut made. Moving from burned-in subtitles to external SRTs was achieved by doing all my editing with a source file that incorporated burned-in subtitles - once this was done, I went through the edit and recorded the start and end timestamps for each subtitle to create a new SRT file. Once this was done, I re-exported the finished edit with a subtitle-free source file.

Other Sources:

NIN - Ghosts I-IV

Special Thanks:

TM2YC for encouragement, motivation and more excellent suggestions than I can list here, but especially the idea of completely removing the "undercover police" storyline. Without his input this fanedit would not be half as good as it is now. Captain Khajiit for extensive technical help at the encoding stage, particularly with regard to issues with authoring DVDs in DVD Architect Studio using 24FPS media.