Terminator 1 & 2 - Page 2

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

Personally, I'm not a big fan of going back and redoing VFX for the sake of doing so... to me it's kinda like going back as an adult and rewriting your old high school essays. The films are classics as they were, and have held up on their own merits, and their character are as much in the iffy stuff as in the great stuff. Which is not to say that experimenting on some shots might not be an interesting exercise, but can you imagine going back and replacing the Frank Oz Yoda puppet in Empire with a CG version? As I understand it, they're considering doing that with the Yoda puppet in Episode I. I can see that as George's choice for his films, but not Jim Cameron's.

And the argument of "we need to update the VFX to make it work for today's VFX-savvy audiences" often results in stuff that can sully the memory of the original, like the abominations that are the "remastered" classic Star Trek episodes... it's like we suddenly cut to a videogame fan version of the shots. Just my own opinion, of course. ;-)

V

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

Y'know, I did a presentation in earlier this year about the Ethics of VFX Manipulation... and I covered the very topic of making alterations to works of art based on "changing creative visions". Needless to say, my examples included the SW Trilogy, Star Trek, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark... I also covered such things as digital botox, product placement via VFX, and dead celebrity endorsements like Fred Astaire and the Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner commercials. This is an especialy hot topic nowadays since the advent of formats like BD are giving studios a reason to revisit doing restorations and such... while you're removing dirt, it becomes a slippery slope where you end up removing matte lines, and then offensive characters (Song of the South, anyone?) and then you start tweaking actors' performances (raise an eyebrow, add a tear)... So where do we draw the line, and can we draw it using Photoshop?

I think the South Park 6th season episode "Free Hat" said it best... check it out at South Park Studios

V

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

You've asked the million-dollar question, Jeff... why don't we get it right the first time around? That answer to that is somewhat complicated in that no one I've dealt with in the studios system really sets out to double-dip anybody; it's a function of new technology, legal issues, marketing opportunities and ongoing revenue streams.

The initial issue is technology: so the BD format comes out, it's barely functional because it was rushed out to compete with HD-DVD, which was nearly a year farther along, and there has to be someone putting out discs for it. The first titles to go out are ones they think they can sell because it should show off the format in terms of picture and audio quality. In the beginning, that's literally all they had to sell BD with, because virtually no other BD feature worked in Profile 1.0! So those of us trying to work with the format in its infancy had to really simplify what we wanted to do, because no players could handle the promised functionality. Now the format has matured a bit in terms of players working, so we can do more. The alternative was to not release anything at all until the format worked better, and miss out on a marketing opportunity to show that the studios are committing to the format. If that sounds like double-dipping, it certainly isn't meant to be... pretty much every review of the early discs --and especially for T2-- noted that there was obviously going to be a future BD version with all of the good stuff from the DVDs on it. It's kind of like buying encyclopedias (for those of you old enough to remember those actual book things prior to Wikipedia!)... do you buy this year's set and have something you can use right now, or do you wait until next year for the updated and revised version? With the latter mentality, you can end up waiting forever and not getting anything.

As for getting it right, the legal issues involved with putting out a disc are legion, and most studios have a threshold for how much they are willing to pay in licensing costs and troubles for any given thing that can be put on a disc. For example, a crew video might exist, but you have to get signed waivers from every person visible in it in order to cover the studio in case someone does not like being shown in it. The Guns N Roses music video for T2 made it onto the laserdisc in 1993 but NOT on any subsequent DVD because the fees from the band and record label are incredibly steep (over $125,000 nearly ten years ago)... the only reason we got it onto the laserdisc version is that the licensing fee was a lot cheaper because the LD sales were literally only in the tens of thousands at the most. Since DVDs replaced VHS as the format of choice, the market is way bigger (in the tens of millions of discs sold), so they charge higher fees. And the legal rule of thumb is, if there's ANY potential rights issue, they drop it.

I can go into the sordid business/marketing aspect in a future post... but in terms of these two titles, it is a certainty that they WILL be redone on BD at some point, since their initial BD releases were somewhat plain and incomplete (at least in terms of what I did for them on DVD). Personally, I am just trying to get a sense from you folks what you think, because I want to see ALL my previous efforts in creating special features make it to the new format. Nothing has been committed to by either studio yet on these titles... I'm just hoping to get a chance to do them when they do happen.

V

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

Jakub: one of the reasons you don't often see (and by "see" I mean "hear"!) isolated music tracks on DVDs or BDs is because the actual musical pieces are often heavily edited to best match picture, and then are faded, cut off, dipped and raised in volume to work in concert with the dialogue and sound effects... therefore, the musical experience alone is constantly interrupted by these machinations. And if the score contains snippets or whole sections of "source" music (meaning actual songs heard in the scene itself, like "Bad to the Bone" or Guns N Roses on a tinny Walkman), then isolating the track often means paying NEW licensing fees and royalties for that use, which really adds up. There are also rights issues involved with the composer or studio, since they may retain the right to separately license or do a soundtrack album, which would be "adversely impacted" by including essentially the same thing for free on the DVD/BD. This reason is why most games on DVDs/BDs may suck, because if they make them too cool and actually videogame-like, they infringe upon the rights paid for by actual game licensees.

All that being said, I can look into the possibility but it likely can't happen without a LOT of additional cost.

Also, note that we actually had a musician named David Haas write some new music specifically for the "No Feat" doc on T2 Extreme when we had no Brad Fiedel T2 score music that fit the mood of what we wanted to convey... just three cues out of eighteen. And I actually have been looking for the original TV spots... ;-)

Hope this helps,

V

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

A production diary is doubtful, and probably not that interesting, to be honest... and it's hard to write a journal while in the trenches with bullets whizzing by! ;-)

Don't know what the legal issues are regarding the score, but I can look into it. If nothing else, I feel there should be a full score CD made available for this film... but that's up to powers greater than me...

V