You will need: one Apple G4 with superdrive and a copy of DVD Studio Pro.
I was lucky. Back in 2001, I spotted a news item saying that
OPENChannel, the screen resource organization where I'm based in Melbourne, was to become one of five proud recipients of exactly that equipment courtesy of the Federal Government's National Digital Access Initiative. I paid my $50 membership and wrote what was probably the most powerful and compelling submission I have ever completed.
They knocked it back obviously. It was too interactive. There weren't, they said, enough opportunities for filmmaker members. I reworked it, resubmitted it and three short months later (short compared with the 12 months it ended up taking me to actually complete the project!) the submission was approved. "MSF on DVD" was to be the first digital media project ever to receive funding through the OPENChannel members' production group.
According to the submission, MSF (Melbourne Short Films, Short Filmmakers and/or Short Filmmaking) would be the prototype for a unique series on filmmaking. It would include 10-12 shorts, audio commentaries from the filmmakers, fact sheets, biographies, and mini-documentaries about the short filmmaking process. This would be a DVD for budding filmmakers to keep on the shelf as they would a reference book: a uniquely interactive resource!
I expected the whole thing to take about three months. The schedule was straightforward. In planning, we would select the short films, design and write everything, get permissions and prepare for the next stage. In production, we would make the documentaries, build all the menu screens, record the audio commentaries. In post, which was really 'authoring' but I hadn't wanted to put the film people off, we would do all the stuff I was most interested in and understood least: capture, compress, synchronise, burn. Quite possibly in that order.
I don't know if you can call it a learning curve when it goes straight up. Suffice to say, everything was more complicated than that.
How do you even choose 10 to 12 short films? What should the criteria be? Who would suggest? Who should choose? And even when you have a shortlist, you still have to source them, watch them, rate them, get the rights to them. Return them. Though we continued with other streams of the development, the simply stated milestone "Select shorts" took fully three months on its own.
The entire process was littered with traps. "Assign directors to mini-docos." Where do you get directors? Do they queue up to assist you, brimming over with their good ideas? As it turns out, no! "Produce docos" was a useful milestone too, hiding as it does the minutiae of writing them, assembling a crew to make them, hiring the equipment, liaising with management at the locations, getting clearances (getting the legal advice to write the clearances). Did I mention editing them, finding sound effects and music for them?
It's exciting to work in a medium of convergence, but vital to remember that every medium you converge brings with it a full development cycle of its own.
I had two key personnel I couldn't have done without: designer, Nicki Johnson, and sound engineer, Leah Baker. Nicki and I learned truckloads. I had taken a (not very good) course in DVD authoring and asked the tutor a pretty simple question: "what's the smallest font size you should use for menus?" I was met by a dull gaze. Turns out though that there is an answer: 20 points. Don't make your horizontal lines thinner than 4 points. And don't use serifs.
After eight months we'd used up our equipment grant at OPENChannel and had a (very!) rough cut. Spitting out our first DVD-R from the superdrive and trying it in the DVD Player was an anxious moment. Incredibly, despite the complexity, it played. There were some glitches. In fact there were whole sections missing. We had decided to have a live menu: an usher, who tells you a bit about each of the films before you watch it - and who you can 'turn off' in case he reminds you too much of a Microsoft Office paperclip. He was there all right, but he was waving his arms about against a blue screen and the sound quality was, to be charitable, poor. It was at this point too that we realized all our menu fonts were too small and too fancy.
All the menus had to be rebuilt. The filmmaker commentaries, which turned out really, really well, were all really, really long and full of clicks - where we'd chopped them up in the process of making our filmmakers sound so articulate and erudite. The usher had to be completely revoiced. Happily, this was made relatively painless by the new 'voice over' tool in Final Cut Pro 3 (which I now know like an old friend whereas before this project the only editing I'd done was with a blue pencil).
12 months on, and MSF is in testing. Like software, it must be tested for quality, navigation and user acceptance. Once it's right, we will outsource creation of the glass master and burn off 500 discs which, unlike DVD-Rs, will run on any player. After that, it's just a matter of packaging, leafleting, advertising, and arranging for distribution.
How hard can it be?
by Peta Masters
