Mike Meadows
New Wave Entertainment
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A decade ago, Michael Meadows and his teammates at Burbank-based New Wave were among the first DVD operatives to venture onto movie sets. At the time, filmmakers had familiarity with the production crew-within-a-crew concept, since EPK had already established itself. But they weren't entirely sure what to make of these strange new sit-down requests for "bonus featurettes."
"They'd ask us, 'What are you going to do with this stuff? It goes where?' We had a harder time convincing filmmakers to participate in the DVD experience than we do now with Blu-ray."
Meadows -- who recently worked closely with helmer Terry Gilliam on a Blu-ray version of "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" -- believes an even higher level of filmmaker involvement will be needed for Blu-ray to ultimately achieve wide-scale adoption.
"We're going to seek the creative involvement of filmmakers even more than we did for standard-def DVD," he says. "We think we need them to revolutionize the experience of Blu-ray."
Working with all the studios, most heavily with Fox and Sony, New Wave has done bonus features for about 25 released Blu-ray titles and has about 20 currently in production. (The facility also performed creative work on about 40 HD DVD titles before the format succumbed.)
Meadows predicts the Blu-ray workload will pick up significantly when former HD DVD stalwarts Universal and Paramount ramp up their Blu-ray skeds.
POV: "There's a lot of pressure for us to come up with something that makes people go out and buy new discs and players," Meadows says. "We're very excited about it -- it's a new territory for us."
