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What If Fight Club Had No Tyler Durden?
Editing Tyler Durden out of a Fight Club sequence may seem like a (spoiler alert) self-explanatory hijink, but Richard Trammell, the man behind “Fight Club Minus Tyler Durden” actually cooked up the idea while watching the trailer for Lawrence of Arabia. “I thought it would be funny to take Peter O’Toole out of it,” says Trammell, “Before I realized it would be more interesting to remove a character who doesn’t really exist within the world of the movie.”
Trammell then perused Fight Club for scenes in which Brad Pitt’s character did not obscure the background, before taking to AfterEffects. “I made freeze frames of those sections of the background and layered them together until I had enough to cover Pitt throughout the scene,” Trammell says of his process. “I motion-tracked the background of each shot and applied the tracking data to my new background, placing it in front of Pitt and feathering the edges so it meshed seamlessly with the background of the shot.” The result is what any given spectator would have seen all along.
