David Ullman
Filmmaker / Musician / Podcaster
Definitive Digital Edition Video Commentary (2020)
This exclusive video commentary was recorded on October 3, 2020, for the LunchmeatVHS YouTube channel. In it, I reflect back at 41 years old on my experiences making this small-screen student adaptation of James O'Barr's iconic graphic novel as a teenager in the 1990s. During the early days of the COVID19 quarantine, I had begun digging into the original VHS tapes on which we captured our nascent adolescent attempts at capturing O'Barr's comic on home video for the purposes of creating a trailer for my 2001 documentary, Inertia: Re-Making THE CROW. I heard from Lunchmeat's "head videovore" & "editor-in-chief" Josh Schafer around that time, and we ended up collaborating on a VHS release of that project and posting the adaptation to the LunchmeatVHS YouTube channel. I seized on the opportunity to create not only a new digital master but an all-new version of the film, putting back over six minutes of previously cut scenes and combining the 1998 song selections inspired by the source text and the Trust Obey score from a 2001 edition meant to be distributed online via downloadable video clips. I may have even dusted off the old Panasonic VHSC PV-IQ303 Palmcorder I used to back in the 1990s to grab an insert shot in 2020. You can see behind the scenes of that about 33 minutes into this video. Click play and watch along with me!
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The Crow: Directors’ Video Commentary (2003)
This commentary includes both myself and my filmmaking partner, Matt Jackson. It was recorded in Raleigh, NC on April 14, 2003. The split-screen video accompaniment includes a lot of side-by-side comparison panels from James O'Barr's graphic novel, as well as a wealth of unused footage from our three years of production. At the time, I was corresponding with folks at PressmanFilm Corp. (who produced the big-screen adaptation and owned the film rights) about the possibility of posting our student adaptation online in segments—broken up according to the "Pain," "Fear," "Irony," "Despair," and "Death" chapters of the comic book—as downloadable video clips on CrowFans.com. I had re-scored the movie to John Begin's Trust Obey music, and the proposed plan was to launch an offshoot of CrowFans.com that kicked off with a new segment of our adaptation of O'Barr's original story getting posted each month along with calls for the submission of original short films and videos inspired by The Crow. Things were looking good for a while but ultimately never came to pass.
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The Crow: Video Commentary (1998)
Our student film adaptation of James O’Barr’s graphic novel, THE CROW, was created from 1994-1998. The interviews and behind-the-scenes footage edited and presented here as commentary were also captured during that time. The main commentary was recorded on April 30, 1998, and edited in August 2001. Additional interviews and video clips for this split-screen video assemblage were edited in Premiere Pro cc during the fall of 2020. This commentary video captures how I viewed what we were doing while we were still doing it and includes a lot of behind-the-scenes footage and discarded early attempts at scenes from the comic we ultimately re-shot (sometimes multiple times!) or discarded before finishing the project in the fall of 1998.
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