ww2supercut’s Substack
For more than a year I’ve been working on the World War II Supercut, a video project that combines 143 World War II movies into one 12 hour series, with historically significant clips pulled from the movies and ordered chronologically.
The goal is to use popular movies to show the timeline of the war, providing an educational tool to see what was happening across the world at similar times, and make the entire context much more intuitive to a viewer.
The posts for each video can also be found on the fantastic /fanedits subreddit, where the community has been kind enough to follow the project and support it.
I’m writing this post to share some of the process to help others who may want to make a similar historical edit of popular movies, and to warn about some of the pitfalls I ran into. Even just watching 150 movies would take about ten 40 hour work weeks, and that’s without taking notes, historical research, editing, etc. When building a cut like this it’s important to avoid perfectionism, and instead to break the task into multiple small projects, each with their own achievable due date.
I tried to use a variety of films, some higher quality than others, from as many different countries and points of view as possible. Unfortunately, most big budget movies are American or European, so the Western point of view is heavily over represented. The full list of films is below, along with how much footage from each ended up in the final cut:
