Copyright 1997 Post Pro Publishing Inc. 

ASHLAND, OR -- As if DVD wasn't cutting edge enough wasn't cutting-edge enough, Ashland, OR's Aftermath Media has gone one step further with its first production, Tender Loving Care, an adult-oriented psychological drama starring John Hurt (The Elephant Man). TLC debuts as both a DVD-ROM and a parallel, standalone feature film. 

"We have the same content, actors and creative team for both productions,"  says  director David Wheeler. "The multimedia product has a lot more in it -- at least four hours of movie -- and a considerable amount of inter- activity. it takes 48-to-50 hours to get through it." 

Wheeler is partnered with Rob Landeros in Aftermath. Landeros was co-founder of the celebrated Trilobyte gamemakers where Wheeler was a director. Wheeler wrote and directed TLC which was lensed on 35mm film in southern Oregon. Landeros produced TLC and designed the interactivity. Howard Schreiber of Ashland's Full Circle, served as TLC's line producer. The feature film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The DVD- ROM is slated for release this fall. 

The Aftermath partners originally developed the project for CD-ROM when they were at Trilobyte because Trilobyte has "such a tremendous proprietary compression system that you can put together excellent video," says Wheeler. But they switched to film to shoot the movie and began exploring DVD's prospects, deciding the new format would be "a perfect medium for us." 

Most of TLC takes place in an old farmhouse or in psychiatrist Hurt's office. in the DVD-ROM version, viewers see a story sequence then enter the interactive mode where they "get to be in the same rooms as the actors they saw a minute ago. You can read their mail, listen to their phone messages, see the recipes in the kitchen, read the poetry book open in the dining room," Wheeler explains. 

TLC viewers mold the characters through their interactivity instead of just altering the storyline by following different branching scenarios. "You react through John Hurt and what happens in the story," says Wheeler. "The computer logs your impression of the characters and their behavior and starts to form the characters more in the way you see them. The storyline stays very similar but the results are quite different. There are several different endings which are the result of all the choices you've made along the way." 

The locations for TLC were measured and recreated for the DVD-ROM  primarily  with Autodesk 3D Studio Max. Sets were dressed for the movie with an eye on their adaptability for multimedia. "Ken Nash, our production designer on the movie, was also art director and head of the design team for the interactive product," notes Wheeler. "He placed every object thinking in terms of redoing it in 3D, so he avoided  certain things  that would be ridiculously time consuming. There's more leather than lace on the furniture, for example." 

The backgrounds for the DVD·ROM version of TLC were created with 3D Studio Max and captured and composited on Digital Betacam by Aftermath. Vaughn edited the piece on a D-Vision system. 

Aftermath tapped a number of area post production facilities to complete the TLC film and DVD- ROM. "Post houses seem to be very, very intrigued by us," Wheeler says. "Our projects are so complex, but they like rising to the challenge." 

Marie Walling-Thompson, senior editor at Portland's Vaughn Communications, edited the film on a D-Vision Pro with 23 GB of storage which belongs to her own company, Sirius Productions. Walling-Thompson cut the linear version of the movie then went back and recut all the alternate scenes and endings as well as the green-screen special effects elements. 

"I had to keep three or four storylines in mind at all times," says Wailing-Thompson, "to make the scenes with alternate versions flow. Parts of the scenes would be the same, but the key dialogue was different. It was a real challenge." 

Walling-Thompson reports her D-Vision system "performed flawlessly" on the project. "I was impressed. And when it came time for the negative cut, it was accurate." 

Characters from the TLC movie appear in the farmhouse and office as viewers wander through the DVD-ROM so extensive greenscreen compositing of the actors in their environments was necessary. The actors were lensed at the Medford, OR, studio of California-Oregon Broadcasting Inc.. The backgrounds, created with 3D Studio Max, were captured on Digital Betacam and composited in the full Digital Betacam suite at Medford's COBI Digital by senior editor Peter Bedell. He also applied TLC's M&E track to Digital Betacam to prep for different language versions. 

An original score by composer John Welsman, who wrote music for the "Road to Avonlea" series, was recorded in Dolby at Toronto's McClear Pathe facility. Academy Award-winner Paul Sharpe of Vancouver's Sharpe Sound prepped and mixed the sound for the movie and DVD-ROM. "Paul is one of the world's great mixers," says Wheeler. "Mixing the film was easy compared to the multimedia product where the music and sound had to carry over alternate scenes. Making everything seamlessly flow together for multimedia is a new challenge for a mixing studio." 

Portland's Alpha Cine made VHS and Beta SP dailies from TLC's 35mm negative. The lab did the negative cut from Walling-Thompson's EDL, then made a series of color timed answer prints followed by a color corrected interpositive which was transferred to Digital Betacam as a master for all media. 

Before DVD's specs were issued, the Digital Betacam master was transferred to MPEG-1 at IBM in San Francisco; It then occupied 14 CD-ROMs. Trilobyte compressed the video with its proprietary Groovie compression scheme running on the NeXT operating system, TLC then took up four CD-ROMs. 

When creating a DVD product became a reality, Aftermath worked with Intel's DVD Lab in Hilsboro, OR, where Ty Lee did the capture from Digital Betacam to MPEG-2. Lee laid out the entire production on Digital Linear Tape with Aftermath's lead software engineer, Roy Eyman. TLC's DVD-ROM will be pressed for release this fall. 

With TLC, Aftermath has given new meaning to the term 'multimedia.' But Wheeler may not be content to stop with a film and DVD-ROM version of the production. "This movie would be perfect for DVD-Video too," he muses. "You could get the scene variations and different endings through the interactivity of the DVD movie player." -- C.B.