The Thin Pink Line
October 2, 2013
It’s a shame how some films are lost over time. Take for example, the horribly underrated, campy mockumentary film The Thin Pink Line (1998). Looking at the cast list, you’d be quite surprised that you’d never heard of it. Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Mike Myers, Jason Priestley, Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho... the list goes on and on, including 6 former Saturday Night Live cast members!
You won't find it on any streaming service. You won't even find it on VHS or DVD... or so I thought.
It turns out the film was released on DVD in Japan! I waded into the treacherous waters of a Japanese DVD website, and got myself a copy. Next up, I needed to find a DVD player that would let me play DVDs region locked to Japan. Thankfully that wasn't too hard.
Long story short, I was looking for a new project and decided to remake the Japanese DVD as if it was to be released in the US.
New Custom Cover Art
There really aren’t any photos from this film online other than a single, low-resolution poster. Similar to the official poster though, I wanted to focus on the imprisoned character (played by co-writer, co-directer Michael Irpino), but I also wanted to market some of the more well-known actors that appear in the film. Without any photo assets of the main character, it was stock photos to the rescue! Three photos comprise the bulk of the cover: the head (with retouched yellow hair to match the character in the film), the pink scarf, and the orange jumpsuit. It took quite a while to find photos that all worked together!
Next up, I found a few late-90s photos of the famous actors and put them on colors backgrounds (to remove any one in the background).
The movie title art was recreated in high resolution, and the tagline “The Making of the Making of a Documentary” were added next. The tagline wasn’t on the poster, but a few sites mentioned it, and I thought it did a good job of summarizing the movie. A little marketing text about cameos at the top of the cover, and a DVD logo in the bottom right finished the front.
Initially, I didn’t create a back to the DVD cover art. Just finishing the front was an accomplishment! After about a month, I revisited the back cover, and decided to colorize the official poster (which was sepia with pink highlights) and use that for the main image on the back cover.
The DVD Menu Montage
For the DVD menu, I wanted to highlight the principle actors with a montage of clips from the film. The goal was to make it appear as authentic as possible... a menu like what would appear on an official movie release. Because official DVD menus often have a song from the movie, I picked the only song that was available without dialog heard on top of it; a song from the final credits of the film. For the video montage, I felt it was key to find clips without the characters talking, because I wanted only the song audible, and didn’t want people’s mouths moving (and the view wondering what was being said). I think out of the whole project, the DVD menu is what I'm most proud of.
Remastering the Trailer
All the trailers for The Thin Pink Line that are available online are pretty low quality. The trailer on the Japanese DVD had really poor picture quality as well, BUT the audio was the best around. Japanese captions appear over most of the trailer footage, so I couldn’t use any of that. Thankfully, every scene in the trailer is in the movie, and the quality of the actual film on the DVD was excellent. It would be time consuming, but I could extract the trailer scenes from the actual film portion of the DVD. Finally, the billing block slide at the end of the trailer had to be completely recreated due to cast and crew names being misspelled, including one of the directors!
Audio from trailer on Japanese DVD + Video of trailer scenes taken from the film + Newly created title and billing cards = New high‑quality trailer!
Final Thoughts
This project really snowballed into a much bigger project than initially anticipated. Deciding just to make a new cover turned into making a new DVD menu, and then I decided to completely recreate the trailer from higher resolution, better quality video from the film on the DVD. Sometimes when the spirit is moved, you need to harness that energy and put it to work. I’m really happy with how it turned out!
