Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here. I remember a Halloween party I attended just around the time DVDs were first exterminating laser discs. In a non-sober state I engaged another guest in an argument about whether CDs would supplant zip drives as the preferred storage device; my position was that CDs would win because they were round, and by being round they were more in tune with the universe, since there aren't any straight lines in nature. CDs did ultimately triumph, although there's very little proof it had anything to do with my line of reasoning.
That was the late '90s, and it was still pretty rare to find commercial CD burners. In fact, when I got my original titanium PowerBook G4 in 2001, the disc drive it came with, while capable of playing both CDs and DVDs, was incapable of burning anything; it came with a promo external CD burner that never worked.
So here I am, seven years later, having just completed mastering a new DVD of my work from the past year. Not only was I able to create the disc on my computer (DVD Studio Pro), but I'm also burning the copies on my computer's SuperDrive. In addition to that, I designed the packaging as well as the disc's label -- both spit out from my printer.
Over the past three years, I've put out four previous discs, all for the sole purpose of self-promotion. It's a process I generally enjoy, though it can occasionally become grueling because I invariably go back into my work and tweak it. Because of this, I put off the latest disc for 2 months before finally forcing myself into it. The mastering process took roughly 3 weeks for 15 clips plus 5 menus, which isn't bad considering I once spent 2 1/2 weeks mastering a single short.
Most of the shorts I create are done on tight schedules that don't allow for a great deal of fine-tuning. Usually, I get things as good as I can make them under the circumstances, but sometimes there are little things that bother me. For example, in mastering the new disc, I tweaked one short by adjusting one shot by 12 frames. Other pieces required greater surgery, like altering the color-timing or even re-cutting sections to shift the pacing.
Menus can be fun to build from scratch. Doing this, as opposed to using built-in templates, can help establish a theme for the disc. For prior compilations, I designed the backgrounds either by animating graphics in After Effects or by editing spare footage from some of the included shorts. For this new one, I decided to shoot live-action impressionistic montages that would be thematically linked (I'll discuss this further in the next column). The menus were essentially a series of lighting tests built around different times of day, interiors and exteriors. I'm happy with how they came out, though the picture quality was significantly degraded during the rendering process of the DVD build.
Probably the most rewarding thing about creating DVDs is when I give copies to people and they realize my work holds up in another format -- that it isn't just tiny-screen web video. It's genuine filmmaking.