Laurie Anderson Home Of The Brave DVDThere is another site on the web that describes the making of a Laurie Anderson Home Of The Brave DVD. I found the site while trying to find a DVD of this concert film. It was hopeless. It has long been out of print, and the only two types of media this was released on were VHS and laserdisc. The laserdisc had the advantage of being in widescreen format, although long before high definition was available, so the video is letterboxed 4:3 NTSC. Since I had access to new DVD authoring tools, I went searching for the laserdisc on eBay with the goal of creating my own DVD. Surprisingly, I found a copy, still in its original shrinkwrap. I placed a bid and got it for less than $15, far less than some of the VHS tapes were going for. Mostly because I still didn't have access to a laserdisc player, the disc sat on a shelf for more than a year, untouched. Finally, I found out that the Linguistics department at UCSD had several laserdiscs players sitting around, and I was able to borrow one, so I finally got the movie loaded into Premiere. In the meantime, DVD authoring software really improved. I got access to Adobe Encore DVD which works really well with Photoshop for creating menus. Once I figured out the tricks in using Layers in photoshop to make rollover DVD menus, I finally had the motivation to complete this project. A couple scans from the outer cover of the laserdisc and a few frame grabs from the video, and this is what the menus look like:
To get access to the fonts that Laurie used in the slides during her show (Chicago, Monaco, Geneva), I fired up an old Macintosh running System 7. At the time this movie was made, Apple only had bitmapped fonts, so after a few tricks to bypass TrueType fonts, I managed to get the look that I wanted. Being a fellow Laurie Anderson fan, I would love to be able to offer a copy of this DVD to anyone who owns an original Home Of The Brave VHS or laserdisc, but I'm sure Warner Bros. would love to prosecute me for doing that. If anyone has the motivation to get the necessary approval from Warner Bros., I would be happy to make a copy for you. Considering the tactics the MPAA and RIAA are taking these days, I find this prospect highly unlikely. Keep pressuring Warner Bros. to release this title on DVD. It's long overdue! UpdateTo mark Laurie Anderson' 60th birthday, Nonesuch Records will re-release Laurie’s breakthrough first album Big Science. Special note to Laurie: Please do not allow your audio engineers to process this with heavy dynamic compression! Also in the works... DVD film/video box set collection, including "Home of the Brave". More details are on Laurie's page, http://www.laurieanderson.com/.  |
