This weekend I spent about 48 hours finishing up the Death Grip behind-the-scenes featurette The Life of Death Grip, which clocked in at 75 minutes. I also finished authoring the DVD and the Blu Ray masters and shipped them off to Signature Media this morning. If all goes as planned, we’ll have 2000 DVDs and 1000 Blu Rays to sell at our June 30th Theatrical Premiere. We’ll also have shirts. And if you’re in California, please come to the premiere. You’ll like this film, I promise.
I made the cover art after I finished the BD and DVD masters, so I ended up squeezing more onto the discs than it actually says on the artwork itself! So here’s an updated list of special features:
Blu-Ray: Even though the printing company will only burn a single-layer Blu Ray disc, which limited us to about 2 hours of videos, this version still has its share of special features and I loaded it to the brim, utilizing almost all of the disc. All special features are in 1080p HD.
- Full film in 1080p HD
- Commentary with me and producer/co-star Rebecca Ahn
- The Compound – a 13-minute short action film, from which we cut the old teaser for our IndieGOGO campaign to raise funds early on
- A deleted fight with Johnny Yong Bosch, which was part of our IndieGOGO campaign
- A deleted fight with Yun, which was reshot in favor of a longer fight
- Bullet Time
- Outtake Reel – 14 minutes of outtakes
- Paper Pushers short film
- 2 small Easter eggs
DVD: This one’s a dual-layer disc, meaning it holds twice as much information as a regular DVD, but like any DVD it’s in standard resolution instead of the ultra-crisp 1080p you get in the Blu-Ray version. I used 5mbps VBR 2-pass encoding, and the film codec we shot on has a lot of bit depth, so it still looks damned good. I loaded this disc to the brim and had almost no space to spare from the 8.5 gigabytes available.
- The Life of Death Grip – This will be the reason people might choose the DVD over or in addition to the Blu Ray. It’s a 75-minute behind the scenes look at all aspects ofDeath Grip, from casting Johnny Yong Bosch to budgeting, location scouting, and tons of making-of footage for the fight scenes in the film. Includes interviews with Johnny and two more industry pros, J. J. Perry and Shahar Sorek.
- The Compound (same as above)
- Outtakes (same as above)
- The Art of Throwing – All the throwing outtakes from the film
- Commentary with me and Rebecca (same as above)
- Deleted fight with Johnny (same as above)
- Deleted fight with Yun (same as above)
- Deleted scene at a sushi restaurant
- Deleted scene with Mark
- Deleted segment of the end fight, which made Kenny out to be a little too ruthless
- Deleted segment of the care home, which gives away too much of the film
- Alternate car scene, which was funnier than we wanted at that point in the movie
- Paper Pushers
- Bullet-Time
- Easter egg
Now we wait for the printers to get the shrink-wrapped units to us while we make the soundtrack CD for the donors, print Death Grip shirts, print new retro SP shirts (the “Our Pain Is Your Pleasure” ones), and attempt to get 800 people to our premiere.
The DVDs and BDs will be for sale at The Stunt People Store on or around July 1st.