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TIM RITTER'S PRODUCTION CORNER #12
DVD EXTRAS & DOCUMENTARIESThere’s no arguing that the DVD market has exploded and caught the public’s fancy faster than any other format, even VHS. In under five years (1998-2002), over 25% of U.S. households purchased a player. And this time, software (movies!) was priced like compact discs, aimed at consumers who wanted to purchase and own their favorite movies. The biggest selling point of DVDs (aside from pristine picture quality and easier storage because of its small size) are the EXTRAS that are put on every disc. You can now watch a DVD and feel like it’s a film school! There’s commentaries by the directors, writers, and producers. There’s trailers, alternate endings, bloopers, interviews, and making-of documentaries. As the market evolved, so has consumer demand for these features.
The DVD market has also brought renewed interest to older B-titles, even those shot-on-video. It’s been a boon to the business and a way for a lot of us to keep going. Some of my older titles are already out on DVD and doing quite well in the marketplace. Savvy shot-on-video moviemakers are packing their movies with “extras” for distributors to package with their movies. This is an important area, especially for the no-budget moviemaker, so I thought I’d go over some things that you can do in advance. As you shoot your movie, it’s easier to compile all this stuff as you go along. That way you don’t have to struggle to put together a bunch of stuff after-the-fact, finding yourself short of material.
If you’re an aspiring filmmaker, you must first and foremost be a fan. And to be a fan, you obviously not only enjoy movies but you also enjoy documentaries that chronicle making movies. With the burgeoning DVD market, many movies are enjoying re-release with the added bonus of incredible documentaries on how they were made. Granted, some of these documentaries were previously available on laserdisc, but as many fans on a budget know, those Criterion Laserdiscs with awesome supplements could drive you into bankruptcy quicker than a Las Vegas casino! Some of the better documentaries were released on VHS as well.
One thing I’ve always done with my “higher profile” movies is document as much of it as possible. Not long ago, I put my third documentary together, which chronicles the making of my 1995 slasher movie Creep. I will use this as a model for how you put one of these things together. (These documentaries are great to have around no matter what you use them for---a full VHS release, to show investors how you work, or as extras on a DVD. I would say always make your first cut as long as possible---it’s easy to cut these things down to a shorter length for special DVD features.)
First things first: obviously you don’t want to put together a documentary on making your movie if you’re going the less than zero camcorder route. I mean, I salute you for the effort, but I don’t think anyone would benefit from a videotape that simply shows one camcorder taping another with very few tips or behind-the-scenes special effects scenes. (The thing to do here, especially if you have great behind-the-scenes anecdotes, is interview your cast and crew in a studio-like atmosphere and cut to clips from the video while they talk, including footage that was cut. That often works well!) Now it’s definitely different if you’ve devised a million different devices for cool camera shots or devised Tom Savini-inspired gore shots (or even computer generated stuff like matte shots, etc.). THAT kind of stuff is beneficial and deserves the documentary treatment. But your basic no-budget movie with “talking heads only” doesn’t need a documentary. It needs interviews and commentary.
Making Of videos should at least chronicle movies that are shot on 16mm film, higher end video, or ones that utilize lots of special effects or tricks. It should also be a movie with some sort of budget (even our under-$4,000.00 movie can qualify). And of course, if there’s lots of eye candy in your movie (pretty girls to be interviewed, etc.) and you see a way to make additional funds off the behind-the-scenes footage, that’s always a plus as well. (John Russo has released many ‘behind the scream queens’ style videos that compliment his movies, such as Santa Claws.)
Let’s go over some of the better documentaries that I would watch before embarking on a project like this. Use them as blueprints or guidelines. One of the best and most famous Making Of videos (actually shot on 16mm film) is Roy Frumke’s Document Of The Dead, which chronicles the making of George Romero’s classic film, Dawn Of The Dead. This masterpiece has all the most satisfying elements that I look for as a fan: 1. On the set footage of the actual shooting of the movie. 2. Interviews with the cast and crew on the set. 3. Exhaustive behind-the-scenes footage on how the special makeup effects were achieved. 4. Flawless, concise narration which shows you how the movie was scripted all the way through the distribution process. 5. Stills gallery, with exclusive pictures from the movie and behind-the-scenes pictures to boot. To me, these are the basic elements needed to put together a documentary that is entertaining, educational, and inspiring.
Now that you know what the basic elements are, it’s a good idea to put someone in charge of all this while your movie is being made. This can add to the overall headaches of production, but the end results can be worth it, especially with the DVD demand for this type of material. Basically, I usually find someone who’s interested in filmmaking and who will be on the set anyway. I put them in charge of getting as much behind-the-scenes footage as they can, including interviews with the cast and crew and documentation of all the special makeup effects. If there’s lots of special makeup effects, I usually ask the special makeup artists to videotape their test work and even do demonstrations specifically for the documentary. This is great publicity for them and worked out quite well on my first Blinded By The Blood documentaries which chronicled the making of Killing Spree and Wicked Games, respectively. I incorporated footage that the special effects people did and it turned out to be both interesting and enlightening for viewers.
Another thing to do is keep track of all your publicity and put it into a file. This will come in handy later on. (Publicity includes all local and national media coverage, including newspapers, magazines, and television coverage of your movies.) These are always elements I like to include in my documentaries---things like news clips, interviews, and newspaper headlines really add to it. They are also great to edit montages to, especially if you have a lot of narration going on that explains how the movie was put together.
Another tip is to make sure that whomever is taping your behind-the-scenes footage has a steady hand in videography. In other words, someone who can shoot handheld stuff quickly and professionally. You don’t want to make the audience seasick, or worse, have a video that constantly bounces in and out of focus because the AUTO FOCUS was left on! Once in a while it’s okay (after all, it is a documentary and should look “raw”), but if this is overdone it can get old real fast. Format is unimportant as long as the picture quality holds up decent. I’ve used everything from VHS to digital Beta for behind-the-scenes footage. Most of the documentary stuff for Killing Spree was shot on VHS video.
Some other excellent behind-the-scenes documentaries that should be seen include the excellent BBC Production The Fear Of God: The Making Of The Exorcist, Heart Of Darkness: The Making Of Apocalypse Now, Long Live The New Flesh: The Films Of David Cronenberg, and Fox Video’s Alien laserdisc, which includes so many making-of supplements that it will literally take you weeks to pour through. It’s almost like taking a filmmaking class. The new MGM DVD release of Last House On The Left has a good example of a documentary put together with new interviews, raw footage, and production stills that is quite effective. Hats off to producer/director David Szulkin! Another DVD to check out with excellent supplements is J.R. Bookwalter’s WITCHHOUSE 2. It’s jam-packed with extras and even won a VSDA award, beating out major studio DVDs. Bookwalter is a filmmaker who knows how to deliver on the supplements and any of his Full Moon or Tempe releases are always a pleasure to watch.
Let’s talk about putting your documentary together. It usually takes me a few years after one of my larger projects is completed to finally get around to putting the Making Of program together. If you do the editing yourself, it can be a difficult process, because you pretty much have to relive the entire process of making your movie, for better or worse. It’s also tough (yet humbling) to be totally honest while putting these things together. You really have to show your shortcomings and mistakes throughout this process but this can ultimately be rewarding--- it can improve your future projects as you reflect on all the things that went wrong. Perhaps other filmmakers will learn from your mistakes as well and avoid the pitfalls you spotlight.
Putting together a making-of video usually begins like this for me: I peruse through all the behind-the-scenes footage and decide whether it’s long enough and good enough to put together. Then I go through all the news footage that I recorded off of television, if there is any. Then I re-read all the press the movie received, mainly to see if there’s enough interest in the movie and enough fun behind-the-scenes anecdotes to keep the potential viewer interested. This process usually takes a few weeks.
Once this is done, I rewatch the on-the-set footage to figure out what order to put things in and figure out how the documentary will ultimately be structured. I like a how-to video to show everything from start to finish, so I usually start at the beginning: how the idea came about, who the principal people are involved in the production, what influenced the screenplay, how the money was raised, how casting and special effects (or stunts) were storyboarded and accomplished, all preproduction on the project (including location scouts and anything else noteworthy), then finally an exhausting look at making the movie on the set, which becomes the video’s centerpiece. After that, I like to cover postproduction and distribution, including public and critical reaction as well (if at all possible). As an added bonus, I’ll slip in news footage, interviews, stills galleries (culled from on-the-set snapshots or behind-the scenes footage) and even a rock video to boot!
Things I also try to include in documentaries or DVD supplements are alternate endings (see the Joyride DVD for a great example of this!), extreme scenes that were toned down, and scenes that were cut for pacing. Things like this were spectacular in The Making Of The Exorcist, for we got to see the original ending and Linda Blair’s famous deleted “spiderwalk” down the stairs scene---years before they put it back into The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen Before re-release. If your movie has any theatrical play, it’s always good to document that even for making-of prosperity.
Once I have my on-the-set footage set up in my mind, I begin the tedious task of transferring all the still photos taken during the making of the movie onto videotape. This usually takes another two weeks or so. (If you have digital photos and MPEGs, it’s a lot easier, especially with computer editing! Stills can easily be culled from “frame grab” programs with nonlinear editing.) Then I videotape any pertinent magazine and newspaper coverage that I plan to visually integrate into the program. I jazz these things up with color effects, music, character generated graphics, and anything else that I have access to.
Next up is the script, or in this case, the transcript. I usually narrate my documentaries, so this cuts down on time and cost. But as with everything, it must be written. This is the most time-consuming task, where I go through all the articles, reviews, scripts, and notes taken while the movie was being made and try to use everything as best as possible. I also watch all the behind-the-scenes footage again, trying to figure out what will need to be explained by narration so I can include it in the transcript. I flesh out all the trials and tribulations that it took to make a project happen whether they are good, bad, or ugly. Articles remind me of things that went down on the set or quotes that cast and crew might've said that are relevant to the order of things. I try to take all this and put it into a fun, cohesive piece that takes you through the making of the movie, from start to finish. During this process I also transfer any other material that may enhance the program: videotaped auditions, storyboards, poster or video box artwork, radio interviews, etc.
When all of your material is on tape or in your editing system, then it’s time to do the narration. This is a long process that takes a great deal of patience, whether you do it yourself or hire someone to do it. It usually takes anywhere from one to two weeks for me to do this, and usually I just record the narration directly onto videotape (using a good microphone) so I’m ready to lay it into the edit system (or on the Master tape) and add visuals over it. (Over the years, I’ve found that it’s easier to lay the audio down first and add visuals rather than trying to cut the audio to match footage or even worse---narrate while watching the footage. Talking while the footage is running is best done with the leisurely and relaxed commentary tracks for producers, directors, writers, and actors, etc.)
By now I have two or three months invested in getting this project ready, so you can imagine how it begins to feel. Once all your material is ready, it’s good to just step away from the whole thing and give yourself a break from it. (Just like I suggested when making a movie---take breaks between every phase when possible.) At least a week or two is good. Then you can come back with a fresh perspective and your creativity will be a lot sharper. By taking your time and not rushing through all this, the program will yield much better end results.
Once you’re ready for editing, you have to ask yourself how much you want to spend. If you really want to go all out and rent editing suites to put all this together and have music playing in the background, then by all means, do so. Just try not to spend too much on everything, because in general, you only sell a few hundred copies of these type of Making Of videos if you release them directly to tape. The main reason for making a documentary these days is to use it on DVDs as extra material, especially in the low budget scene. It’s not like we have a budget like From Dusk Til Dawn and the end results are going to be like Full Tilt Boogie: The Making Of From Dusk Til Dawn, another excellent documentary to watch for inspiration. But we can do our best to come close to that!
In the past, I put documentaries together with a standard JVC editing deck that offered the basics: flying erase heads, a jog-shuttle wheel, and audio dub capabilities. I took the narration, laid it down, and added the video footage (behind the scenes or stills) over the narration. For interviews and such, it’s just a matter of timing things as best as possible the same way I’ve mentioned in the POSTPRODUCTION chapter. Using this method worked really well for me in the past, especially with Making Creep. People who have seen the finished documentary have no idea that it was edited with the most basic equipment: a $500 VCR and the camcorder that most of the footage was shot with. You do have to have endless patience to pull this off, but it still works to this day. (And take advantage of any and all special features that the camcorder may have!) For those with the luxury of having computer editing in their home, assembling a documentary like this is all that much easier. Capture your footage and have fun!
The nice thing about documentaries is that they don’t have to be what I would call “picture perfect.” In my opinion, documentaries should be a little “rough” and “raw,” especially for small movies. Some of the slick Hollywood featurettes are just that: too slick to be fun. They feel more like a generic advertisement for the movie rather than a passionate look back at the making of a project. You don’t want your documentary to feel sterile and clinical like you did it strictly as a promo---keep the spirit of independent video and film alive while you put these things together. Most fans really just appreciate seeing stuff that they otherwise may never have gotten the chance to view in the first place. A great example of this is the documentary that chronicled Eric Stanze and his collaborators around while they made Ice From The Sun. I enjoyed the documentary On Thin Ice as much as the finished feature! Maybe even more!
The editing of a documentary generally takes me another month or so, sometimes working 12-16 hours a day. I worked on completing the Making Of Creep project (a.k.a. Blinded By The Blood III) for three or four months straight and finally, you see the light at the end of the tunnel when it’s done.
Next up you can package and distribute your finished program to interested buyers. Making Creep turned out to be feature-length at 90 minutes (as long as the movie!), so we printed up video insert covers and put them into VHS clamshell boxes, selling copies at horror conventions, on the Internet, and through magazines. This was very successful for this particular program. And even if you don’t go this route, having such a documentary completed makes it that much easier when a distributor asks for “extra stuff” for the DVD release of your movie. It’s very simple to break down a long documentary into shorter segments for those much-cherished DVD extras. Some people don’t know it, but in Hollywood, there’s a new job category that’s getting a lot of attention these days: DVD Producer. That’s right, cutting-edge extras are in such high demand for movies of all budget and category that there are now professionals who work exclusively with projects from the very beginning on “extras.” Keep this in mind as you start a new movie!
Another thing I might mention is that if you’re planning to put together extensive Making Of videos, always put that information in the cast and crew contracts that everyone signs so there are no misunderstandings later on when the material is released.
I’m very pleased with the way Making Creep came out and I like the way it’s formatted into production status chapters (scripting, production, editing, distribution, etc.). Anyway, if you’re up to a personalized self-reflection of your project that you want to share with others, think about putting a Making Of project together. It may be a grueling task, but it will show others how difficult it is to make these kind of movies and that we’re not just running out there and cranking this stuff out overnight without any thought. The bottom line: lots of time, effort, and passion go into every aspect, from start to finish.
Here’s some DVD “extras” that are now Standard for releases of all budget, so keep these things in mind when delivering the goods to a distributor:
1.) Director’s Commentary: (Not necessarily limited to director, can be cast and crew, or there can be a few separate tracks with various artists commenting as they watch the movie.) What’s important when supplying this extra is the AUDIO---make sure you use the best microphones possible and that commentary is in sync with the final cut of the movie you delivered. Since the replicator will only be using the audio track, you can deliver commentary on VHS tape, which has CD-quality audio if you use a decent microphone. Make sure you do this in a nice, quiet place with as little background noise and distractions as possible.
2.) Trailers: Short advertisements made for the promotion of your movie at film festivals, etc. You can have a few trailers of various lengths and even trailers from other movies you might have made as additional bonus material.
3.) Short Films: Other movies you might have made can be used as possible extras---even a short version of the feature you made. Fans love this kind of stuff, especially when it showcases the genesis of a project.
4.) Still Photo Gallery: A slide show with music that highlights everything from behind the scenes shots, scenes from the movie, and poster art! Always fun!
5.) Bloopers: Some people love to see fx that didn’t work or actors that flubbed their lines. For big or small movies, this is always a much-coveted extra!
6.) Alternate Endings: Anything that wasn’t used for the finished product, fans want to see what “didn’t make it” into your final cut!
7.) Interviews: New or old, it doesn’t matter, get some interviews of cast and crew in there as extras! This is a great way to give publicity to your team and keeps them wanting to do more projects with you.
8.) Storyboards: Yes, transfer any storyboards and put them in the program. Fans love to see how things were drawn or planned out and compare it to the finished product.
9.) Behind The Scenes: This would be all the “on the set” making-of footage that is allowed by time and space on the disc---usually, the maximum for this (including the feature) is a total of 180 minutes on a disc. This is where the special effects artists can also reveal special effects tricks.
10.) Anything else you can think of---web links, screenplay, reviews, information---here’s where a good DVD Producer will come up with new and exciting things to add to the disc that are fun and different. As the market grows, there will be more and more goodies in this category and I think some of the best stuff will come from sharp independents! So put those thinking caps on and set some trends!