By David E. Williams, November 9, 2007
Award-winning filmmaker and DVD producer Robert Meyer Burnett launched his career in the early 1990s, working at Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment—best known for the direct-to-video Puppetmaster and Trancers franchises. While at Full Moon, Burnett created behind-the-scenes materials for the company’s half-hour Videozone promo pieces, which appeared on most of its VHS releases.
The first DVD Burnett worked on was the special edition of his own feature directorial debut, the 1998 sci-fi send-up Free Enterprise, which he also co-wrote. It wasn’t until Burnett began working for DVD content providers Kurtti-Pellerin in 2000 that he took on special-edition production full-time: “Originally, we worked exclusively for Disney, creating material for such titles as Toy Story, Fantasia and Tron. The company then moved on to create the four-disc box sets for the extended editions of [New Line’s] Lord of the Rings trilogy.”
In 2002, Burnett launched his own company, Ludovico Technique, named after the fictional image-based “cure” imposed on the anti-hero of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The company’s credits include the DVD releases of Superman Returns, The Chronicles of Narnia—The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, X-Men 1.5, Spider-Man, X2, The Usual Suspects and Valley Girl. Most recently, they completed work on the Blu-ray release of the action film Shoot ‘Em Up.
On the set every day of a given film’s production, the Ludovico Technique crew not only oversees the creation of the exhaustive special features for the show’s eventual DVD release, but supervises the entire EPK shoot. The staff prides itself on working hand-in-hand with both the studio and a film’s unit publicist. This synergistic relationship creates a dual perspective, serving not only the needs of studio marketing division, but giving the DVD consumer in-depth extras they’re unable to find anywhere else.
DV: How do cast and crew regard you on set? Do you find yourself looked upon as a more integral part of the team than, say, when special-edition DVDs first started?
R. M. Burnett: Great DVD is absolutely a director-driven medium. If the director welcomes you on-set and is comfortable displaying his process for all the world to see, the rest of the crew eventually will be as well. If he or she doesn’t, neither will the crew. On Superman Returns, Bryan Singer wanted me on set each day, every day. I seldom stopped shooting. He would constantly address the camera and answer questions whenever prompted. Because of this, I was as much a part of that crew as anyone else working on the film. However, on Narnia, Director Andrew Adamson was making his first live-action feature, and it was a massive undertaking—so he obviously didn’t have much time to interact with the DVD crew because he had so much else to worry about.
How have budgets evolved for you? Does DVD production money still come out of a studio’s marketing wing?
Yes—[but] these budgets vary tremendously depending on the project’s size and schedules
. Some projects, like Valley Girl, have extremely small budgets with entire production schedules not lasting more than four weeks. However, projects like Narnia and Superman Returns both took two years to complete, with budgets reflective of such size and scope. My company specializes in large-scale, long-term overseas production. In addition to our normal production costs, we also have to allow for housing, plane tickets, car rentals, insurance, meals and medical care—for months at a time. When submitting these budgets to the DVD divisions of the studios, they always balk at such line items until you say you wouldn’t even be going to Sydney [Australia, as in the case of Superman Returns] unless that’s where the film was being made.
However, the biggest budgetary problem on such large-scale projects comes from the studio payment schedules. Usually, you receive 50 percent of your budget upfront, with the remainder presented upon delivery. On an eight- or 10-week schedule, this makes perfect sense. On a two-year project, however, this can become extremely problematic.
Do you go for a consistent look across all of the DVD work you do, or do you tailor it to each project?
I always try to do something different with each disc. For instance, I’m sick to death of watching EPK-style “talking head” featurettes, so, on Superman Returns, I made the decision very early on to only speak with people while they were actually working. Any interviews I conducted were usually done on-set, sometimes even when the cameras were rolling on the feature itself.
Take us through your toolkit. Go-to cameras? Post workflow of choice?
We need great cameras that are lightweight and sturdy, and can keep shooting after hundreds of hours. Usually, we use one of the big three: Panasonic, Sony or Canon. I’m a big fan of the Panasonic cameras, especially how they handle audio—and while the P2 cards are expensive, I certainly appreciate working with them. We always mount each camera with two Sennheiser mics—a shotgun for dialog and an omni-directional for ambient sound. We only use cameras with balanced XLR inputs.
As far as post is concerned, we finish entirely inside the Avid. We cut, mix and output right out of the computer directly to either HDCAM or D5. Sometimes, we may farm out for complex graphic material, but for the most part we do everything inside one system. I seldom have a problem passing quality control.
You’re finishing your first Blu-ray title, Shoot ‘Em Up. What change in your process and tools did Blu-ray entail?
Well, I was nervous about continuing to finish inside the Avid with full HD. However, after we submitted our first 25-minute piece from the SEU DVD and it passed QC on the first try, I felt pretty good about it. Obviously, the format will eventually allow for tremendous interactivity and utilization of sizeable amounts of material. Even though huge DVDs like the Lord of the Rings extended editions seem to have endless amounts of material, I can assure you there’s 10 times more footage you haven’t seen. The HD formats will allow more of this material to be utilized.
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