Producer Van Ling explores new format on Terminator 2 Skynet Edition Blu-ray
With Terminator Salvation hitting theaters this week, it’s a good time to look back at previous “Terminator” films. Van Ling, producer of the Terminator 2 Skynet Edition Blu-ray talked to The Oklahoman about The Terminator, the Blu-ray, and the challenges of creating this edition.
Ling was James Cameron’s researcher and creative/technical liaison on “The Abyss.” Ling was also involved with the design and creation of the visual effects on films such as “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” while serving as Head of Production for Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, so it’s particularly appropriate that he revisited that film as the producer of the Blu-ray.
For more from the interview with Van Ling, see next Tuesday’s LIFE section of The Oklahoman, where he discusses the ethics of using modern visual effects to change classic films of the past.
Matt Price: You’ve been associated with the Terminator previously – what’s the most exciting about your involvement with the new Blu-ray?
Van Ling
Van Ling: For me, it’s the opportunity to explore the capabilities of the new format and creating new ways of presenting information. Blu-ray as a format has some very interesting things it can do in terms of interactivity and what you can link to the film and how you can access it. Interestingly, some of the things we’ve done for the new T2 Skynet Edition are things that I had wanted to do with T2 even as far back as the early 90s with CD-ROM format but never got a chance to try …like presenting the film in a way where you can call up the storyboards or the script or production information and video segments while the movie is playing. And now we can do it with much better picture and sound quality.
MP: What kind of archival materials did you have access to in deciding what would be included on the Blu-ray Terminator 2 disc?
VL: We’ve had a wealth of production information that was interesting to fans and film students alike that we’ve amassed over the past 16 years for laserdisc and DVD, and it was a challenge to figure out how we
Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2
might be able to organize that material for a new audience on Blu-ray. Since I had been intimately involved in the creation of nearly all of that archival material, I had a pretty good idea of what we had and what we could do …the challenge was the timeframe and resources we had. There were so many text files and storyboards and still photo galleries and film elements and video material ranging from VHS tapes to Digital Betacams that we had to sort through.
MP: Also, given your experience with the film — why have the Terminator characters and films been so enduring?
VL: Jim Cameron’s original Terminator mythology is this dynamic intersection of the dark side of technology and the power and resourcefulness of individuals as the hope of humanity. In this age of ever “smarter” and ubiquitous technology -even our refrigerators are computer-controlled-we are living in this networked world where technology can be so scary, controlling and dehumanizing, yet we still believe that humanity is the key…the key to humanizing our technology so that it can work for us, rather than against us. That idea appeals and resonates with a lot of people.
MP: What are the key elements to producing a great DVD or Blu-ray?
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2
VL: To me, it’s about creating something that can benefit from being interactive with the film in some way, to be tied in to the main feature presentation even as you can access other things, be they on the disc itself or through BD-Live. It really needs to tie back to the film, so you have a context in which you’re learning stuff…be it about how the film was made or the creative process of the story or the real-world research that informs the filmmaker’s vision. If you have that and can organize it well, it can be a revelation and be much more than a lot of marketing featurettes tagged to a movie. For me with T2, it was kind of about creating a “film school on a disc”.
MP: What were some of the challenges in producing the new edition of the Terminator 2 Blu-ray?
VL: We had a short amount of time (maybe three months) to put it all together in order to get it out in time for the release of Terminator: Salvation, which was the logical time to release the new T2 Blu-ray. We had a very finite set of resources and a collaboration between Lionsgate, the film’s domestic licensee, and
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2
Studio Canal, who owns the film and controls all of the international territories for distribution; this meant a lot of back and forth and timezone lags that we normally would not have had. And we had sixteen years’ worth of special features that we needed to cull through and figure out how best to present that material using the capabilities of Blu-ray. For me, that meant building picture-in-picture segments, audio slideshows, trivia data, graphics, menus, and a ridiculous number of intricate timecode lists to tie it all together to the film. The programming and authoring were a very complex challenge, so hats off to the folks at Blink Digital Studios in California and at Sofatronic in Germany for doing an amazing job.
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- Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2
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- Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2
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- Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2
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- Edward Furlong in Terminator 2
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- Van Ling
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[...] More from The Oklahoman interview with Van Ling available here. [...]