Well, dear readers, I am quite overtired, having been up and at ’em since six in the morning. So, while I’ve got any energy left, let me talk about my late afternoon and evening’s entertainment. I got a call at three-thirty in the afternoon telling me the check disc for the Nudie Musical Blu and Ray was ready. So, I moseyed on over to the authoring facility in Burbank. The guy who’s handling the film too me into a conference room, put the disc in a Playstation machine and we began watching on a big screen Panasonic. The first thing we see is an FBI warning – it looked quite good. The next thing we see is a disclaimer about the content and commentary tracks – that’s pretty standard for any disc that has that sort of content. Then I got the first thrill – the special Kritzerland Blu-Ray logo created by our very own Mr. Doug Haverty. It looked splendidly splendid. Then the menu came up. It’s very clean and simple, basically consisting of the cover art logo and a menu bar. There are four menu options – Play Film, Chapters, Set Up, and Extras. Clicking on the latter three brings up sub-menus for various and sundried things. The first thing we looked at was the Chapters – he told me that they had to fix one thing in the chapter menu, which is the ability to click UP so you can get to other chapters without having to click on every image. Then we went to the bonus content and looked at some of that – we played a bit of the audio commentary, watched a little of the documentary in low-def. Then he went to the film itself and we watched a little of the beginning and a couple of short bits – and it looked as good on the Panasonic as it had at that lab on whatever TV we were watching there. For me, that’s good news, as that means that everything is very accurate on the transfer and it would take a TV that had its color settings futzed with to really screw up the way it looks – and, as the person who made the film, I can only tell you it looks like what it’s supposed to look like, so if I see screencaps that are brown and off, I will finally be able to say your screencaps are completely off. If anyone anywhere tries to say the usual stuff – grain structure is intact and I see only traces of DNR and edge enhancement halos and sharpening – I will finally be able to say, you see how wrong you can be? And when they argue, and they will, I can just sit comfortably and tell them that NO DNR or edge enhancement or any sharpening was used and therefore whatever it is they thing they’re seeing is, in fact, a product of light hitting celluloid. And despite my saying that, I’m guessing they will choose to be stubborn and not believe it. And I will laugh and laugh and just when I think I can laugh no more I will laugh again, because I will have proven that armchair experts simply don’t always know whereof they speak. You kind of can’t argue with the guy who was in the room for every step of the transfer process.
Then I took the disc home and began playing it. First, I watched the film from start to finish and they did a wonderful job with the disc – very healthy bit-rate, lossless HD Master Audio mono track, and best of all a beautiful image with color the best and most accurate this film will ever have. It is very different than the DVD – at the time we did that I thought it looked great color-wise, but a simple comparison now reveals that the DVD is just brown and quite ugly. Here, the color, as designed, really pops and is even garish and very saturated in certain scenes, again totally by design. At last, the sets look like they did when we shot them – even the theatrical prints didn’t have saturated color and that’s partially because my co-director and I were not involved in the color timing and neither was the cameraman – the color timing was supervised by the producer and he simply didn’t push them to do what we would have liked. So, in the film within a film numbers, I really made the color pop and it’s so much fun to see it that way. The clothes really have detail and their colors are entirely accurate now – I know this because I had several perfect color Kodak slides from the shoot, as well as still owning almost all of the clothes I wore in the film. It’s so much fun for me to see, for example, that I’m wearing a green sweater in the scene where I do the crazy dance – on the DVD it’s just a non-color – it looks black on the DVD. Needless to say, I was very pleased. And compared to the DVD this transfer is astonishingly unblemished – no splices, no scratches, just occasional negative dirt and even that is VERY minor. It’s the best the film has EVER looked and probably ever WILL look. Sound is what it is – mono, like 99% of the movies released in 1976.
I then watched the Nick Redman making-of documentary and I’d forgotten how much fun and how wacky it is. I watched the deleted scenes, listened to some of the commentary tracks, and checked out each and every thing. So, there are really only a couple of fixes – one is the chapter thing, one is taking the two Easter eggs from the DVD (which they kept as Easter eggs on the Blu-Ray) and making them part of the special features menu – I don’t want anyone having to search for anything. And then the Blu-Ray credits pages whiz by in the blink of an eye, so they have to fix those so each page stays on the screen for five seconds – all easy fixes. At that point, I think I get a second check disc, and then when I approve, off it goes to the plant.
Prior to all that, I’d arisen at six, announced our new CD, printed out orders, and did the four-mile jog at nine. Then Vicki Lewis and Joan Ryan came by and we ran their presentation. I did a minute amount of staging and we cleaned up their patter a little and it’s now a swift and fun fifteen minutes. Then I did some banking, picked up a couple of packages, then came back home. I finessed what I’d written yesterday, liner notes-wise, and I began writing the Gardenia commentary, which I’d like to finish by Thursday. I printed out more orders and then I got the call from the authoring facility. Oh, and I had a chopped salad with turkey and just used red wine vinegar for the dressing, so very low-cal. Later, I got some snacks from Gelson’s – a tiny bit of crab salad, some low-fat cottage cheese and a cucumber roll, all very calorie friendly.
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because I really must get some beauty sleep – I can barely keep Ye Olde Eyes open.
Today, I must do the four-mile jog, then I’m going to my LA choreographer’s house to watch a rehearsal so I can get some ideas on how I want to shoot what she’s doing, then we have our first Gardenia rehearsal, which I’m very much looking forward to. I’ll have to eat at some point.
Tomorrow, I meet with my cameraperson in the morning, then I have a lunch meeting, then I have to finish writing liner notes and commentary. Thursday is our second Gardenia rehearsal and then Friday we shoot an episode of the new web series. I’m hoping the long weekend will be restful.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do the four-mile jog, see a rehearsal, have a rehearsal, and eat. Today’s topic of discussion: How old were you when you did the following things – walk, talk, see your first movie (and what was it), see your first live show, have your first date and/or crush, and read your first book on your own? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland where I shall bask in the loveliness of Nudie reborn.