“I wanted it to feel more movie-ish and less like a video presentation,” says Kuramoto about transferring Chris Ware's drawings from the “Lost Buildings” stage show to DVD.
Ware originally planned to create a traditional carousel slide show. But during rehearsals he wasn’t able to create the precise timing he envisioned. So Ware assembled the images in iMovie and ran the slide show from his PowerBook. After the performance, Glass transferred the project to Final Cut Express.
“Ira is a radio guy, so he’s great on audio, but he wasn’t real clear on working with video,” says Kuramoto. “And he’s not exactly a computer whiz. Still, he got Final Cut Express and he laid down all the slides and did the transitions and timing to create a rough cut for the DVD. For a guy who had never touched the software to more or less put the thing together as you see it now — that’s pretty impressive.”
“If I made a mistake and thousands of angry PRI listeners sent back their DVDs, it would be my fault. As far as I know, no one has.”
It was up to Kuramoto to finish the rough cut in Final Cut Pro HD and design the DVD. “Aside from our own Twinkle reels, ‘Lost Buildings’ is only the second DVD I’ve ever made,” he admits. “For me, it was a chance to make an entire DVD from the ground up: encoding, menu design, animation, extra features, and then have the files I made sent off to the mastering facility.” He laughs. “If I made a mistake and thousands of angry PRI listeners sent back their DVDs, it would be my fault.” Happily, notes Kuramoto, “as far as I know, no one has.”
New Life As DVD
Kuramoto explains the challenges of recreating the performance as a DVD. “The artwork looked great the way they had it on stage, blown up huge on a big screen, but it would have been terrible on a computer or TV screen due to the limits of NTSC.” To start took Glass’s original Final Cut Express rough cut and redid the entire presentation in Final Cut Pro HD. He then transferred all the animation from 29:97 to 23:976 so it would play as progressive scan on a TV. “I wanted it to feel more movie-ish and less like a video presentation,” he says. When he completed the editing in Final Cut Pro, he brought everything into DVD Studio Pro to design the navigation, branching, menus and extras.
Animator, cartoonist and Twinkle founder Gary Leib. His work has appeared The New Yorker, Musician Magazine, the New York Observer and many other publications.
Kuramoto wanted to represent accurately in the DVD what the live audience would have seen on stage. “But the fatal flaw was that Chris designed the slides as tall rectangles, or what I came to refer to as narrowscreen,” he says. “This meant that some of the smaller images would be hard to see, even on the biggest TV. But the relative sizes and positions of the images were integral to Chris’ storytelling, so I made a second version of the slide show that blew up the images to full frame for those who want a closer look.”
He would have done the full-frame slide show as a second angle, but with the unused space on the DVD, he was able to turn the two angles into separate tracks and use the highest possible bit rate. He also made a QuickTime movie that’s the same resolution as the files Ware used during the live show, so people watching on their computers would get the closest approximation to the performance.
Buried Treasures
The animator has definite ideas about what makes a DVD worth watching — or not. “Sure, I could have just phoned it in,” says Kuramoto dismissively, referring to the straight-up transfer of a film to DVD without adding new ideas. “And I find that most DVD menus are done by people who couldn’t care less. They never even saw the movie. They just hack it out by the standard format.”
Though Kuramoto used a standard DVD menu structure (play, movie, chapters, special features), he did so only because “that allowed us to be unconventional with the menus themselves without baffling the viewer.” But he wanted to design the menus in a way that was in keeping with the style of the show itself. “There are a few labels, but they’re mostly based around icons that Chris and I chose,” he says. “And the further you get into the extras, the fewer labels there are.”
True aficionados, Kuramoto knows, like to dig up their own DVD treasures. “I figure that those who are interested enough to check out the extras will be willing to puzzle it out,” he says. There are even treats for hard core comics fans. “If you look closely, you’ll see that the icons on the main menu page are colored,” adds Kuramoto. “But when you go to the first extras menu, the icons are just Chris’s inks. And on the second extras menu they’re pencil sketches. It’s kind of a continuous deconstruction of his artwork — that was my genius idea.”
Next page: “Crazily Beautiful”