BIG SIGHTING IN LITTLE STUDIO!

Few people would probably notice or care these days, but martial arts fans would take notice. Actor Peter Kwong, who many fans would remember as Rain, one of the three storms in Big Trouble in Little China, was in the building today for a casting call. I actually talked to him.

He brought a huge sword with him. Although I wasn't sitting in on the audition, from the sound I am certain he did some demonstration with it. Big Trouble in Little China is one of those cult favorites that has stuck with me since childhood. Why didn't it catch on? A film like that made today would be phenomenal!

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THIS MEANS WAR!

The dream has come true. It wasn't Sony that did it. It wasn't JVC. It wasn't even Canon. It was Panasonic! According to an article:

Panasonic has announced the AG-HVX200, and it’s obvious that they’re playing for keeps. They want to win it all. With this camera they’ve combined some of the most-sought-after features of the two most popular digital cinematography cameras, the $70,000 VariCam and the $100,000 CineAlta, kept all that was great about the DVX100, and packaged it into a $5,995 wunderkam that does it all!

That article can be found at DVXUser.com.

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DIY - CONCLUSION

So what was the point of this whole thread? Well, originally I wrote:

I was in Best Buy today and I saw something...

I want to talk a bit about the history of how I made my first DVD from start to selling it on this very site, and about the differences between that time and today in the world of do-it-yourself, finally reaching a conclusion as to where to go from here.

So what was it that I saw in Best Buy? Basically, I saw on one shelf, everything that you would need to accomplish what I did by that long process explained in this thread. It was all right before me. Photo quality printers could be had very cheap. Printers that print directly on the disc for disc art were there. Insert labels on which to print the cover art were right there! Of course blank DVD's are dirt cheap. So this begs the question, is it still necessary to use such a service?

Obviously if you're a large studio doing a run of 40,000 discs, you would use a service like Technicolor or Discmakers. But for the indie, the question is now up in the air. If you create original content and seek to make it available on DVD, you could conceivably create DVD's on demand. It may be very cheap to run 1000 discs these days, but what if you only need 250? What if you need to get off the ground? Now which is cheaper? It may just be in your best interest to do it yourself!

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DIY - FINALLY SEEING

Well, without really knowing if anything was on the tape, I sent my DLT and a CD with my cover art and other materials off to Discmakers DVD duplication service. After that, it was a waiting game. I think a couple of weeks went by before I heard anything from them. It was about the art more than anything.

Eventually I got check discs from them and was finally able to pop a disc in a DVD player and watch what the final would look like. I also got prints of what the artwork would look like. It was a little dark, as printwork always is compared to what's on screen, but it was passable and I wasn't redoing it.

On the whole it was a success. It wasn't more than a month before I had boxes and boxes of DVD's ready to ship. Things got even easier when I did Shadowskin. At that time it was possible to send a DVD-R as a master. The cover art and disc art had the same requirements, but I had done it before so it wasn't so much a hassle.

So what was the point of this whole thread?

More on that next...

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DIY - IT WAS FAR FROM OVER!

After all my writings on car explosions and the PSP, (about which I am far from done)I forgot about the whole "Do-It-Yourself" DVD story that I was writing! Fortunately, someone wrote in to remind me, so I will pick up where I left off. With maybe a smattering of PSP stories in between. :)

So I had to author a disc. Not only that, back in 2001, the kind folks at Discmakers DVD duplication service website required that this disc be mastered to DLT. DVD-R did exist at the time, but no one would ever accept them, and even then you couldn't just use any drive, you needed to make a "glass master", and that cost more than just buying the DLT machine!

The tool I chose for the job, after much research, was Sonic Solutions DVDit! Now I don't consider this the best tool for the job, but at that time it was. I was new to the game, just starting out, knew nothing about DVD authoring and this tool got me into it very easily. Authoring a DVD in this was so easy, in fact, that I don't think it even needs explaining here. There is another aspect, however that does, and that is encoding!

Yes. To make a DVD, the MiniDV files that I had wouldn't work. Everything had to be encoded as MPEG2. Now DVDit could do this, but I wasn't happy with the result or lack of control over it. Also, the 2GB file limit in Windows at the time made it impossible to get the "making-of" video for Chaos into a single file to encode. I needed an encoding solution that worked directly from the timeline in my editor, which was Adobe Premiere. I chose DVMpeg from Darim Vision. Subsequent problems with the company led me to quickly drop this tool, but it did the job at the time.

With my files encoded as MPEG2 and after a more than easy authoring process in DVDit! I was ready to make a disc. Fortunately, DVDiT! wrote directly to the DLT machine. This was one of the reasons I chose it. Now I had everything that made the Understanding Chaos DVD sitting on a DLT tape. Sadly, I had absolutely no way to check to see if it was actually there!

More on that next...

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EXPLOSIVE FINISH

As it turns out, what you are seeing in the video below really did happen, but it was, in fact, the shooting of the popular TV series 24. They had been shooting in my apartment complex for the past two weeks, and Friday night was the big finale of that episode where they staged the car explosion.

It was loud. It literally shook the room. Car alarms went off everywhere and you could hear people in connecting apartments start scrambling, probably to see the aftermath. We all got notices on our doors about the filming.

I was just about to go to bed when I heard the call, "Everybody behind the barricade!" Up until then, I figured they had already done it. Then I saw them setting up and decided to watch. Then it came to me, "I wonder if I have time to go and get my camera?" I almost talked myself out of it, but then I thought, "C'mon, how often does something like this happen?" So I got the camera. The result is the video you see below.

Time to get back to that whole PSP thing now...

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THIS JUST HAPPENED OUTSIDE MY WINDOW!

Click here for full video!

MORE THOUGHTS

Ya know, I am having more thoughts on this whole PSP thing, and I am really liking the idea. There's no end to what could be done in the realm of exclusive content created specifically for this little device. Much of it would be for show, but just the high profile nature of it makes it of such great interest.

In Japan, hand helds are everything. Being a much more "on-the-go" society and often strapped for space, the PSP makes sense. People lined up to get the things when they released, but it attracts a particular culture. That's Japan, here, Korea, you name it. It is a culture that sees a crossover in video games, comics, anime, electronic music, blockbuster movies and more. It's not hard to target content!

My mind is taken to properties like that of the Ninjai Gang, where a group of martial artists and stuntmen, tired of the industry shaft, made their own content and released it free on the net garnering an extremely large fanbase. Content creators, at this very moment, could be creating small, chapter oriented properties on their sites, which would increase readership and repeat visits, to be downloaded specifically for the PSP.

With talk of a soon to come web browser (The South Korean version will ship with one in May)and an eventual keyboard, it wouldn't just be downloading for the PSP. Soon users will log into sites and download entertainment content directly to the PSP! I am seriosuly thinking of devoting just a small amount of time each week to experimenting with this concept. (I say that knowing that I am devoting 100% of my time to the PSP currently. ;P) Could be a manga, could be a simple chapter oriented show, composed of two to three minute shorts. Could be anything really.

That's just a few ideas. The potential here is limitless! What do you think?

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ANOTHER PATH?

OK, I want to take an aside from the whole "do-it-yourself" thread and talk about how I have joined the ranks, the masses; Yes, I have gone and bought a Sony PSP!

Now don't think for a moment that I have been taken in by good graphics and the promise of hours of gameplay that will keep my mind from the task at hand, which is making some shows and building the indie anime presence in this world. No. There are far more things possible on this PSP than playing a game or two. One of them, is this:

I wouldn't have believed it, but we are seeing manga on the PSP. Not more than a week or so on the market and the number of things people are doing with this little device has already become amazing. I found this in an article on PSP 1UP.com. This is only the beginning of potential.

I am imagining some kind of launch of a new manga title exclusively as digital manga for the PSP. It would be free, the point of which is to build a property and an audience and lead to future products like DVD anime or games based on that same property, which could then be sold from the site to that audience.

That's just one idea. The potential here is limitless! What do you think?

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DIY - CONTINUAL LEARNING

One thing you will notice on the Discmakers DVD duplication service website is a number of templates and instructions on how to prepare your DVD master and associated materials. Now remember, this was all new to me. On the site I found some downloadable templates to use for creating both the disc and insert art for my DVD. Unfortunately for me, these templates required Adobe Illustrator.

I think it was in the very early nineties that I had last done vector art. That was in Corel Draw, and a very early version of it too. I had no desire to buy or learn Adobe Illustrator to do this work when I had a perfectly good Aura software that I could do the DVD cover and disc art in. Of course, Discmakers simply wouldn't do the job unless all things conformed to their standards. Needless to say I made the investment in both Illustrator and that huge and heavy DLT machine.

Using Illustrator was not a problem at all. Actually all I did was create all my art in Aura and then load it into their template and place it. Nothing was actually done in Illustrator. Of course I got all the same ol' hisses and boos I get every single time I do print work for anyone. "If you art isn't vector it won't print right." "You should never rasterize your fonts! If there's a problem we can't make corrections and the resolution won't be good enough."

It's the same story everytime. I also get chewed out for using JPEG images too. Yet everytime, my print work comes out just fine. Why is that? Maybe some people are just stuck in tradition and know little of economy, especially when they have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars of printing hardware and software at their disposal. I look at this as no different than the snobbish attitude some have against shooting DV or even HDV instead film or uncompressed HD.

Of course, being able to create cover art is one thing. I also had to author a disc!

More on that next...

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DIY - THE FIRST REVELATION

I believe it was one fateful day, back in 2001, when I walked into my office at Westwood Studios and found a catalog for Discmakers DVD duplication service.

On the very cover, or maybe it was the page left open for me, was an add for 1000 DVD's in amaray cases with full color printed disc and inserts for a price that wasn't absolutely outrageous. At the time I think it was near $4000, but this was for everything, shrink wrapped and ready to go.

Now imagine, back in these days there was no such thing as someone owning a DVD burner. I am not sure they even existed, on store shelves, yet, but certainly they were not in common use at all. So things weren't going to be as easy as I thought. This led me to one of the strangest, one-shot, investments I have ever made, a DLT tape backup drive, for this is how DVD's were mastered in those days.

Talking to my rep at Discmakers, I found that only a DLT tape would be accepted for the disc master, but this was only the beginning of sorrows. Apparently, in order to make this entire process happen, I would even need other software that I didn't have nor know how to use!

More on that next...

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DIY - THE BEGINNING

So there I was standing alone under the beam of the street corner lamp, rain coming down like boulders around me...

OK, maybe it wasn't quite that dramatic. I think I was actually sitting in my office at Westwood Studios sometime early in 2001 when I realized that I was going to make a DVD. Now, of course, I had no idea where to begin, or what was even necessary. Remember, at this point, I didn't even know how to author a disc.

I was determined to do it myself. So, I went to the experts. I was in a studio that put out game titles on CD and DVD all the time. They would know how to do it, right? Well, they didn't. Not exactly anyway, and I was then directed to the services of Technicolor. Yes, I am talking about the same one you used to see on the end of films that said "in Technicolor!" Here was a place where it seemed they do everything for you. Maybe a bit too much of everything in some places, but actually not enough in others.

You see, I wanted to make my DVD. I wanted to make the menus, put it all together and then send it someone to do it right. I didn't want a service to make that part which I knew I could do myself. On top of this, there was also the back end to consider. They made DVD's, but what about packages, printing and cases? A big studio might be able to wrangle all this from three different places in large volume and save money, but what about the little guy? Add to that I couldn't make heads or tails of all that they were asking on their application forms.

It seemed I was going to have to do a lot more research than I thought to make this happen.

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DO IT YOURSELF!

The mechanics of do-it-yourself. These are where my thoughts are. I was in Best Buy today and I saw something...

I want to talk a bit about the history of how I made my first DVD from start to selling it on this very site, and about the differences between that time and today in the world of do-it-yourself, finally reaching a conclusion as to where to go from here.

Who's interested?

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April Foolin' Around

Ok, that was a bit of April foolin' around.

Now it's time to get back to prodcution techniques. Mirage has come along way in the world of 2D animation. More on that next...

THE BIG SCORE!

I have finally made the deal I have been long searching for! Thanks to overseas development groups I have entered into a partnership to fully fund production, marketing and distribution of my current projects on a national level. While not the largest investments in the world, I am talking about collaboration with a major production studio to get these shows done right.

Now, of course, as with any production deal involving a major studio, there is some degree of compromise:

Several top producers at the studio, after a number of heated meetings came to the conclusion that the show needed some slight modifications to make it a bit more "hip" and appeal to younger audiences of today. The show will focus a bit less on the Daniel character and look into the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Action sequences would be added by the creation of "ninja-like" bad guys.

While nothing has been finalized, initial reactions to press releases in the faith based home video market have been quite negative. One video store owner said this:

"This is a total travesty. The last thing we need today is to trample over the moral values of these stories which have been around since before I was born. This is just another example of exactly what is wrong with society. Shows like this, along with the internet and violent video games have turned our world into a modern day Sodom and Gomorrha."

Speaking of games, planned along with the DVD launch of this title is a first person shooter for the new PSP system and a trading card game similar to those of popular Japanese shows. Equating these card games to tarot cards, religious groups are in an uproar, as one commentator noted:

"There's a warm spot in hell reserved just for the producers of this garbage which they call a show."

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