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Special Report
Isn't technology wonderful? I write these words not with my hands, but with a dictation program installed on my laptop computer sitting on the front seat of my urban assault vehicle. Driving down Wilshire Boulevard speaking into a headset is eliciting stares from curious passersby, but it's a long way from Beverly Hills to San Diego and I wanted to use this time productively while my experience at the New Line Home Video's Editor's Day is still fresh in my mind. We were invited to the Four Seasons Hotel, not far from world-famous Rodeo Drive to attend the first of what could be many PR extravaganzas from New Line Home Video.
The members of the press were in force to attend this special event highlighting the technical achievements of New Line as related to DVD development. Copley News Service, Daily Variety, DVD Express, DVD News and E! Entertainment Online all had reps there as well as L.A. Daily News, Los Angeles Times, Video Business and Widescreen Review. New Line's PR firm, Bendman, Goldman and Helper also had a few staff members in attendance. We were also pleased to see, and finally meet for the first time, Bill Hunt from The Digital Bits. After the presentations, Bill and I sat around talking about all the other DVD webmasters behind their backs. Just kidding. Well, we did discuss a few... It's a good thing that I decided to wear my camel colored slacks that day, because otherwise, Bill and I would have been dressed identically. A photo of the two of us (which I'm not publishing because Bill looked better than I did in it) clearly reveals the shocking truth that despite rumors to the contrary, my head is actually quite larger than Bill's. Heresy!
New Line itself was well represented with various staff members from marketing, theatrical exhibition, and technical to explain the process of developing the PLEASANTVILLE DVD. Lending support, were the key players from LaserPacific Media, who helped New Line assemble their most impressive DVDs. Matt Lasorsa, Vice President of Promotions and Publicity for New Line began the presentation, introducing various members of the New Line development team responsible for the Pleasantville DVD. Being a first time venture, the atmosphere was a bit thick and subdued. In a darkened conference room, several rows of seats were set up, each containing a nice press kit, containing a Pleasantville T-shirt, the Pleasantville soundtrack CD and a copy of the Pleasantville DVD itself. Nice.
New Line arranged for M&K Sound to set up the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio system (which performed very well), and we enjoyed the opportunity to meet with M&K's Special Projects Coordinator, Barry Ober. Based on our conversation, we may have some M&K products to review in the near future here at The BIG Picture. We'll keep you posted.
In the front of the room a 36 inch Sony XBR monitor was set up, connected to a Toshiba laptop with DVD ROM drive. Different specialists from a the studio came up one by one to point out special features of the PLEASANTVILLE disc, and some of the behind-the-scenes detail that went into the production. Pleasantville was chosen to demonstrate the immense efforts and technology that New Line is putting into their Platinum Series editions -- and like many of the other fine films in this special class of its own, PLEASANTVILLE is loaded to the gills.
New Line Home Video has assembled a valuable support team of outside vendors that help the film studio bring their creative concepts to life. For instance, J. P. Leonard, co-founder of Angry Monkey was on hand to share his insights into the creation of multimedia elements that New Line has incorporated on their discs and LOST IN SPACE website, which Angry Monkey designed. Angry Monkey also developed the menu elements for BLADE and PLEASANTVILLE, and is currently working on the Platinum Series edition of THE CORRUPTOR. I wish that we would have had the opportunity to chat with Leonard, but the event was well choreographed, with lots of people there, leaving little time to speak with everyone that we would have liked to.
We did get the chance to visit briefly with Mike Sowa, Senior High-Definition Colorist from LaserPacific -- and lamented about how difficult it can be for reviewer's like us (and consumers like you) to differentiate between errors in cinematography, or the filming itself vs. DVD authoring that might produce less than ideal transfers. There are many variables to address in the authoring of film to DVD -- and we received a glimpse of the inordinate care that must be applied to what is actually a very painstaking and quite complicated process.
Before meeting these folks and learning about their complex and challenging tasks, it's easy to assume that the process of taking the film and transferring it to DVD is a simple, or even automated function requiring little, if any, human intervention. In the case of some of the bargain basement DVD's we've seen littering our local video stores shelves (and I do mean that in a literal sense), a case for a lack of human intervention in the authoring process could certainly be argued.
But besides the plethora of extra features and value added items, New Lines' extraordinary commitment to image and sound 
quality is what really sets this studio apart, in our opinion. The attention to detail is extremely impressive and abundantly clear on New Line Platinum Series releases. So many things that we take for granted -- images that pass before our eyes in mere seconds, are painstakingly scrutinized for sometimes hours at a time by several specialists whose job it is to insure that we are treated to the very best possible presentation of film on Home Video that the current technology allows. To be fair, we're seeing many studios devoting significant care to the task of authoring their DVD's properly -- and more are making great strides in that direction, but perhaps the "peer pressure" that New Line brings to bear when they create disks like PLEASANTVILLE is helping to elevate the standard of the format -- and we like that. A lot. Of course, the symbiotic relationship between New Line and LaserPacific Media is the real key to the mix. As special as that relationship obviously is, we're glad to see other studios utilizing the talents and expertise of LaserPacific as well. As an example, we watched Artisan's THE TEMPTATIONS last night and were blown away at how sharp, colorful and pristine the image quality was. Surprised, until we saw the LaserPacific logo pop up after the closing credits.
Pleasantville, we learned, contains over 1,700 special effects. New Lines' Vice President of Post Production, Video and Tech Operations, Evan Edelist (pictured below), lent some fascinating insights into the creation of Pleasantville, both as a film and subsequent DVD. Here is what Edelist had to say during his presentation:
"Over three years ago, I was approached in post production in New Line Cinema about Pleasantville -- how the movie should be made. Obviously it was the first kind of film that was going to utilize over 1,700 special effects that all had to be done digitally, so, it needed to use new equipment that had never been really explored with before. So, what I'm going to do up here is tell you a little bit about the background of mostly just picture quality from the beginning of the movie all the way to the DVD.
I'm going to illustrate how -- and I believe this to be true, in fact -- that the DVD is the most representative vision of director Gary Ross, the DP (Director of Photograpy) John Lindley and the color effects team. Certainly the video master process is also, a -- if you will, a perfect representation -- this DVD mirrors the digital Video master. I will point out how the DVD in fact will show you something that you weren't able to see anywhere along the whole process until you got to this Home Video product. One of the reasons why is because all the effects that were scanned into a computer were utilized in such a way that they were optimized ...and the way they looked at that computer level, was the perfect rendition of their vision -- and it wasn't until we got to the video mastering, the DVD part, that we were able to get back to that same look.
What happened was the original photography was lit for black and white photography, but shot on color stock. So what they did was they took the color stock and they stripped it into black and white again and they took these 1,700 special effects and "cookie-cutted" around the actor but they shot it in such a way that it was really low contrast -- and the intent on their part was by doing it this way they could add a lot of contrast in the black and white realm and create an image that would look most appropriate to reflect black and white TV, like in the era of Pleasantville. And in able todo that, they had to go through many many tests but in the end the process was just utilizing normal color stock and normal processing techniques. But part of what happens is when you go through the process of creating these effects, you have the need to be more concerned with the fact that when you have a cookie-cutter of color within the black and white, you still need to blend that and create a seamless effect of color and black and white footage mixed together. So they had to spend hours and hours to try to figure out how to work with certain aspects of the background shots and create that effect.
Way back then the Spirit Datacine from Philips was just coming out and it was a machine that at that point, nobody really knew what it was. The point about how to create something when your coming from film and your going to go into a computer and you're going to go back to film -- that creates a lot of issues on a technical level about resolution or quality that will be apparent high-end that will mirror perhaps film quality, and you don't want to lose all the value that you get from the original negative when it's scanned into a computer -- and then it raises questions about the differences between 4k, 2k and levels that you can store at. Well, the Datacine had just come out and there was really only a couple at that point that had the ability to scan at 2k. So we went and did some tests in London at this one location and we came up with the fact that 'you know this really doesn't look that bad.' We didn't have pin registration, but we weren't introducing a lot of signal to noise and we were also able to go back to film and create something that was pleasing. You didn't get a lot of weave and you didn't get the artifacts that would be something that might be an issue dependent on the hardware you use and the technology at the moment and the fact that it's not film anymore.
In the end, we picked Cinesite here in L.A. and we used a scanner -- the Spirit -- to scan in non real-time all these 1,700 special effects into the computer. And they used a really large level of Silicon Graphics computer stations to hold all this stuff together. In working in the stations they created what was called 'batch files' and they tried to go for something called 'natural light' and they went through this entire process shot by shot to create these effects... The black white and color become characters in the movie, if you will...
Once they got all these 1,700 effects into the computer, they scanned back to negative through a process called 'solitaire'. It's another non real-time process and you just have to go back to negative -- what we created is an optical camera negative (OCN) once we got that OCN, we had to make quick ANSI prints to see what everything looked like. Well, the key to making ANSI prints, once you're dealing with the film sensitivity in stocks and what's termed as the 'soup' at the lab, they had to run all the effects at once through the film process so we could be sure that the soup at the lab that was used to create the print -- that the chemistry used at the lab to create these prints was consistent. Because if you just did one one-day and one another day you might get variances between red and magenta and green and issues that would come up that would be confusing... In the end they realized that 1/100th of a point on the densitometer was noticeable. And that's a very very minor level. I mean, that's so minute that if your eye could pick that up -- that you're dealing with a very, very sketchy, dodgy ground there where you just have to get it just right. So they kept working on this to try to get it right and had to spend a significant amount of money to keep running the film through.
Once they got to the original negative -- once they cut the original negative that was the optical negative and they cut it all together, they didn't have an awful lot of timing to do with the color because they already achieved this effect in the computer and when they had come back it was pretty much 'n the zone' already. Although it was in the zone, they realized that there were compromises. When you watch a print of Pleasantville, in the theater, you can see that it's on color stock. If this soup that day on the release print has... well they like the fact that they went from the optical camera negative to interpositive to internegative back to release print because it built contrast in it -- contrast is what they were looking for. But because you're on color stock and you had black and white you would get either green or you'd get magenta in your image. So that was a real problem. But you know, it's very subtle and it's not really noticeable, but it's another one of the points that I'm trying to make today about the fact that when you watch it this way, on DVD, you don't get any of that because when we went in into the transfer we turned the chroma level off, and we just..." [interrupted by question from audience member]
"So are you just saying that basically Digital to analog and back and back and back and back, you got some more contrast but you also got some color shifts that are noticeable depending on the production of that particular print..."
[Edelist resumes] "In fact you do get variances depending on the print of the day that you processed -- it may be very minute -- and it might not be noticeable to the average viewer but it is something as a technician -- if you're very critical about what you're trying to achieve here... in other words the goal was to go through this whole process to create something that would just fly. In the end because nobody had done it before with all this new equipment, there were certain issues that came up that were perhaps limitations, but nevertheless the film still worked, I would say on and 80/20; that most of the people that went to a movie theater and watched it weren't really thinking about "does this look a little green in the black and white" or " does this look a little red". But when we get the video transfer part of it, we were able to eliminate those issues."
Edelist then pointed out a very difficult to reproduce scene in the movie in which three-men are sitting on a bench in black and white, and stared dumb struck at a young girl dressed in a red walking by. If you look carefully enough, you'll see her color reflection in a black and white store window before she actually enters the frame. Creating this reflection posed a real challenge to the filmmakers. This is one of those fractions of time I mentioned earlier, in which extraordinary behind-the-scenes efforts take place that most of us aren't even aware of, let alone take for granted. Edelist continued:
"That's another unique thing about the movie -- that Spirit Datacine was used twice. That's never been done before. This equipment was brand new basically a few years ago and was used to create the computer scanned non real-time images but was also used for the final transfer process. So then we went into LaserPacific and that's the part where I get really involved and fortunately I don't have to get overly involved because we've already worked out all these 'family recipes' at LaserPacific between their staff, their personnel and their expertise. They are just exceptional at putting together not only the video mastering process, but the DVD and they've done a number of titles for us -- I worked with Mike (Sowa) on Lost In Space, Blade, Bogey Nights... all those titles, and they also went through Laser Pacific with Jay (Sherbon) and Larry (Spangler) and Leon (Silverman) and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
So on the Spirit we had (director) Gary Ross and Michael Southern came in and John Lindley the DP and we all worked together to try to achieve an effect. At that point they were very excited about the fact that all those issues that were anomalies up until then, they were able to smooth out and create electronically, a digital master using the Spirit Datacine, yet a second time down the road with a color-corrected interpositive to create the digital master in high-definition -- and for our purposes, a 525, 16 x 9 letterbox master to provide for the DVD compression. She so we created all our versions and then we went in and we did the DVD compression with them as well, and they have a CQ chip as hardware and they have some proprietary software that they wrote and they are very clever -- and they always have the ability to produce very sophisticated work with lots of added value. In difficult areas that are very tough to deal with, they were very good at being able to figure all that out -- especially within time sensitive deadlines."
Next up, New Line Executive Director of Home Video Production and DVD Development Michael Mulvihill stepped up to the Sony XBR with remote in hand and proceeded to demonstrate just a few of the plethora of value-added extras available on PLEASANTVILLE. Mark Rance, who has produced much of the supplemental material on this disc as well as every Platinum Series title since SPAWN walked in about this time, as Mulvihill was getting ready to demonstrate Rances' handiwork. Mulvihill pointed out that Rance is no stranger to value-added production, given his background with Criterion laserdisc supplements. Mulvihill then went on to demonstrate two chapter stops from the film, three chapter stops from the supplemental material, and the Fiona Apple music video from the closing credits song "Across The Universe". Noting that New Line chose to focus on the aesthetics of the film, he reminded us that PLEASANTVILLE has been nominated for three Academy Awards in the categories of Costume Design, Arts Direction, and Best Score by Randy Newman.
After Mike Mulvihill was finished with his demonstration, Donald Evans, Director of Sales and Marketing, took over to discuss the special DVD ROM supplements that are part and parcel with New Lines Platinum Series DVDs:
"We try to mirror the themes of the movies, so with LOST IN SPACE we worked closely with Gordon Pattison in his 
department to take web assets and interactive features that may be a computer user would like, because we weren't sure how many people would put in movie into their computer. We were surprised to find out that with LOST IN SPACE and with BLADE that over 20 percent of all purchases were been used in a computer. So for us, that was a sure sign that there is a market here and we should be supporting it was not just movie assets, but other things for the computer. [The BIG Picture interrupts with a question]
"How are you able to track the usage of the disc?"
[Evans resumes] "Well, a lot of the assets actually require that you go to the Internet... so we're able to determine the unique number of people visiting the web site who are taking advantage of those features. That started with LOST IN SPACE then BLADE and then recently with RUSH-HOUR and now with PLEASANTVILLE, the themes of the movie being the art and that aspect of it -- we decided to sort of explore that on our DVD ROM features. One thing that we've put onto our DVD is this 'From Script to Screen' (referring to the monitor). And what that allows is sort of like the audio commentary that allows users to understand what the screenwriter was doing. If you click in there, you'll see that you have the entire screenplay available, and what you can do is, you can actually print the entire screenplay to your printer, you can print a scene if you just want see what that looks like, or you can view that scene. With PLEASANTVILLE what we decided to do, which is something that's never been done before, was incorporate the story boards in the screenplay so people can see... what was being done. You click on storyboard and you get a full storyboard of what the designers were doing with that scene. And then what you can do, is you can go back to that scene. All you do is click on 'view that scene now' and what it will do is it'll launch you directly to the corresponding scene in the movie. Then all you have to do is click back on the screenplay and you're back there. Another thing that we did which is never been done before, was we provided in-depth cast and crew bios with web links -- and what this allowed us to do... was to see... the full cast and crew information all the way down to set designers and anyone who got credit on the film. When you click on that name you're launched to the Internet and given their up-to-date bio. So in essence, this product is no longer just a package good, it's a living, breathing product that in six months from now, you want to know what Joan Allen is doing, you click on that and you get that updated information. In addition, you get trivia for the movies, quotes, taglines and sound tracks. We worked with Internet Movie Database to get this information to the user. This is something that hopefully will be of use to the users so they are able to constantly go back to this product and not just feel that "okay, this is Joan Allen's bio up through Pleasantville, but what he she doing now?". Of course, if you go back to the main screen you can play the movie and what that will do, is that will allow you to go to the set top features and access all the other features. We plan to to release 10 titles with DVD ROM features this year. This is something that we feel very strongly about, with a huge market potential for it, and we're going to continue to listen to our users as to what features they like and what features they don't like and make sure that we provide those on both the (stand alone) DVD player and DVD ROM side. And of course different films will be providing different features. We're working to get interactive games for titles that would make sense to the interactive games on. The screenplay is something that we want to put on all of our DVD ROM titles as we move forward because we think that that should be a basic component of the DVD ROM experience."
[Question from audience member] "How the you decide what's going to be a DVD ROM feature, because the screenplay might be something that you should be able to get to from a regular DVD player."
[Back to Evans] Great question. Our goal in providing DVD ROM features -- and it may or may not differ from other studios, is to provide an experience on the PC that you can't have replicated on the set top side. So, we don't have plans to put on deleted scenes for the DVD ROM users because our feeling is that that is punishing the DVD player users, the earlier adopter, by not providing them something that they can't have. The reason why we did the screenplay on the DVD ROM side, is because of the ability to print it and the fact that it's so text based, and that the font sizes are so small, that makes sense to put that on the DVD ROM side. But any features from the DVD ROM side that can go on the set top side and make sense on the set top side we absolutely will do that. Because that... we feel with the DVD ROM, we're just providing supplemental material but we do not want to punish or shut out the (standalone) DVD player user. What's this supposed to do is, for those DVD player owners who one day get a computer, they're now given supplemental material and an extra experience that they never experienced before. So for BLAST FROM THE PAST for instance, or titles like that, we work with Gordon's group to say ' what features on your web site makes sense to bring over to the set-top experience and what features make sense to leave on the DVD ROM experience'?
[Question from The BIG Picture] "Was some sort of a license agreement reached or needed with Internet movie database to use their information -- to access it from the DVD ROM?"
[Back to Evans] No.
At that point, we broke for lunch and were treated to preview reels of forthcoming New Line Cinema feature films, including 
THE CORRUPTOR, DROP DEAD GORGEOUS, DETROIT ROCK CITY, THE ASTRONAUTS WIFE, BODY SHOTS and others. The trailer for AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME filled the entire banquet room with gales of laughter and even caught the attention of the catering staff. If the trailer is any indication, this new Austin Powers flick is going to be the hottest movie of the summer. It looks like it will be even better than the first. It wouldn't surprise me if production for Austin Powers three is already underway. We're also looking forward to LOST SOULS, a creepy Exorcist-for-the-new-millennium flick starring John Hurt, and another comedy pairing Warren Beatty with Gary Shandling.
The BIG Picture would like to thank New Line Home Video for providing us with his unique, behind-the-scenes look at their DVD development. We're looking forward to more great things to come.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Copyright 1998-99, by Jeff McNeal Productions. Click here to see our legal notice.