Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 31) INTERVIEW BY DAVID E. WILLIAMS Q& A (Left) Burnett’s bonus-feature work dates back to the days of VHS, when he shot promo pieces for direct-to-video distributor Full Moon Entertainment. (Right) Burnett captures a moment with Superman Returns director Bryan Singer (left) and star Brandon Routh. THE SPECIAL EDITION DVD PRODUCER ROBERT MEYER BURNETT ON BONUS EXTRAS, BLU-RAY AND BEYOND. A ward-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 www.dv.com 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 dv december 2007 31 http://www.dv.com
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