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awe about the numerous menu transitions Ling has created for the release, and rave about the visual quality and level of detail that went into them. “A lot of credit for the 3D portion of the menus has to go to Johnathan Banta,” Van tells me. “He is a great digital artist who put in a lot of hours modeling, texturing and animating the menus.” It is Banta’s first foray into the DVD realm, but as a visual effect wizard on films like “Dr. Dolittle” and the “Siegfried & Roy” 3D IMAX film, he is no stranger to the art of digital imagery. |
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As another supplement, the disc will also contain a visual text commentary. Because James Cameron was unavailable for an audio commentary track on the release, producer Van Ling decided to go a slightly different route. “I wrote a commentary to go along with the entire film and present a lot of production information that way,” he describes the concept. “Technically speaking, it is a subtitle layer, and you can basically read all kinds of production information and various anecdotes about the scenes as they play.” With Lightstorm’s blessing, Van wrote the entire commentary from scratch, and ended up with 30-40 pages of information. He then placed it all against the actual film. “In one particular instance, the Sub-Chase scene, I wanted to show how many different techniques were used to put this sequence together. I intentionally made the text only as long or short as the cuts themselves. For that sequence I broke down the whole sequence pointing out miniature / live action / miniature / live action shots per cut, so that people can see how every single shot was done.” To give as much information as possible in the commentary, Ling went back in his memory and tried to call up all the effect shots and then talk about their production process. Apart from these supplements, the DVD of “The Abyss” will also contain some DVD-ROM content. Beside web links, DVD-ROM enabled users will find a few games on the disc that have been specially created for the DVD. “We included a couple of custom little games, and fun little things for the DVD,” Van notes. “This material was |
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created by “Click Active Media”, the folks who are also responsible for a lot of websites ranging from Fox, Disney, and Artisan, all the way to Mattel and the official Woodstock webpages. They are really fun to work with, and they created some fun things to go on the disc and the website for the release.” Next time when we visit Van and his work on this special edition of “The Abyss”, we will take a closer look at how the main menu and some of the other ones on the disc came together. The series of images above should already give you an idea how elaborate this process is and believe me, the main menu is chock-full with animations, buttons and gadgets. |
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