DVD Authoring
Warped Time Productions has professional DVD authoring facilities as part of the Final Cut Studio package.
Exile and The Kingdom
Exile and the Kingdom is an award winning film that documented the history of the last 150 years of the Aboriginal peoples in and around Roebourne, in the Pilbara region of north Western Australia.
Exile and the Kingdom has been awarded for AFI Best Documentary and Best Sound, Human Rights Medal and Awards for Best Documentary and holder of a United Nations Media Peace Award.
It was a landmark production not only in that it told this often harrowing story for the first time, it also became the seed of a project to preserve, cultivate and promote the culture and history of this land and its people.
In 2005 the Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation undertook to re-release this film on DVD. Under the supervision of the film’s Director and Co-Producer, Frank Rijavec, the task was sub-contracted to Warped Time Productions.
The Re-mastering Process
Exile and the Kingdom was first released in 1993 as two 53 minute documentaries shot on 16mm colour film stock. A broadcast master exists of a telecine transfer made of these prints on to PAL 1 inch videotape made some time the early 1990’s. Ideally, the best picture quality for a DVD release would come from a new transfer of the original film negatives on to some kind of digital medium using all the advances in technology since the film was made. However, due to budget constraints it was necessary to work from a digital transfer of the 1-inch broadcast master.
Clean up of the film was carried out in Final Cut Pro on digital files supplied by Film Australia. The files betrayed all the defects of technologies they originated from: grain, dirt and hairs on the screen, picture shake from the film to video transfer and dropout (damage on the videotape itself).
As many of the caption and title cards as possible were replaced with digital stills created in photoshop. There were two reasons for doing this:
Firstly, it was on the stills that the instability of the picture was most distracting and the softness of the print most obvious. The re-creations exactly match the originals in type and layout.
Secondly, to update and correct the spelling of some of the names used in the films. In the past ten years a different phonetic system has come into acceptance for the spelling of aboriginal names: Eg: Indjibandi (old spelling) becomes Yindjibarndi. These substitutions are the only changes made to the content of the films.
A large proportion of both documentaries consists of archival still photographs that would have been shot under a rostrum camera. As with the captions, dirt, film grain and image shake was very noticable. When posible, photos were freeze-framed and dissolved into existing camera moves. This had a twofold advantage; The viewer's attention is focused back on the content of the photo and not the movement in the photo, also there was a massive reduction in file size of the compressed movie. This had tremendous implications when it came to the DVD compression phase of this project.
Image processing filters available in Final Cut Pro were used very sparingly or not at all. A de-interlace filter removed most of the dropout artifacts associated with the video-tape as well as reducing the grain shimmer. The worst examples of hair and dirt on the screen were obscured by wipes and disolves using Final Cuts' multiple video layer function.
Compression for DVD
Very roughly, in the sequence of pictures that make up a video file, only a few of these pictures are stored in their entirity. The rest are descriptions of the changes between one picture to the next. The greater the complexity in the individual picture (Such as film grain) The larger the file. The greater the change from one picture to the next, the larger the file.
DVD compression is a compromise between the file size and the picture quality.
The video was encoded using a Two-pass Variable Bit Rate method. This ensured we were able to get the best picture quality at the smallest file size.
The sound track was compressed in two versions, both of which are available on disk: Mono PCM and Dolby Digital™ Mono.
Special Features
All screengrabs and artwork
© Juluwarlu AC, Film Australia
and other owners.
The DVD of Exile and the Kingdom was produced with an extensive range of special features that reflects the cultural importance of this film to the community it was produced to document. It featured interviews and recordings of Aboriginal Elders, many of whom are no longer with us.
Biographies of as many of the participants in the documentary as possible have been included in the form of text screens that can be navigated via the remote controls of a DVD player. Each biography entry could have as between two to five screens associated with it, each with unique text, often with images drawn from the extensive archive of the Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation. There are 23 biographies in the special features section of the disc with additional biographies and notes as PDF documents available for computer users of the DVD.
After the biographies, the most extensive extras on the disc are devoted to songs. There are 34 archive songs featured on the DVD either playable via the menu or as mp3 files for computer users. Each song also comes with an unique screen with appropiate artwork and credits.
The DVD song list was set up as a continous movie file with edit points that return the user to the appropriate menu screen when the menu button is pressed.
There were well over 100 unique menu screens on this DVD, each one individualy created in photoshop. Within the DVD authoring program, each screen will have at least two or more links to other screens all of which needed to be set up and tested.
There is also unique material for computer users of the DVD. In addition to the above mentioned biography notes, there are also teaching notes and a PDF version of the booklet "Know the Country- Know the Song" which was an adaption and expansion of material featured in the documentary movies.
The completed DVD is published by Film Australia as a single-side region-free PAL format disc. It is available for sale from Juluwarlu.
This project was made possible though the assistance of Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation and Woodside Energy Limited.
I would like to extend my profound thanks to Frank Rijavec and Michael Woodley (Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation) for the opportunity to work on this project and permission to publish this article.
©This photograph by Alan Thompson