Liquid Sunshine

Liquid Sunshine DVD Edition

Directed by Jon Barton
Written by Beth Rotheray

This review contains some spoilers.
For my unspoilered review of the original Liquid Sunshine, you should click here.

Introduction

It has been over a year now since Barton released the wonderful short, Liquid Sunshine. It was received with plenty of positive reviews, and it was so good that, very recently, it won Best Drama and Best Short in the 2004 3dmm.com awards. One year after its original release, Liquid Sunshine is available to download again - in its DVD form. As much as I liked Liquid Sunshine (it was only two marks off the golden ninety when I reviewed and rated it back last year) I was a little skeptical about the DVD and I had doubts. After all, how much extra content could you possibly add to a movie just four minutes long? But, as I looked through the DVD folder by folder, it became obvious that I was completely wrong to have doubts. Barton has compiled together an immensely thorough and fantastic DVD, which easily surpassed my expectations. I am now going to cover the content of the released DVD folder by folder:

The Film - Original and Remastered

The folder name is self-explanatory. There are two movie files in here, the original version of Liquid Sunshine, exactly like it was when it was released a year ago, and the remastered version, which contains a fair few slight changes. When you first watch the remastered version having not seen the original for months, you probably won't pick up on many of the small changes at all, if any. But if you watch the original and the remastered versions back to back, you can appreciate the tiny, subtle changes more. Probably the most effective one is that the pacing has been changed very slightly. It may not be apparent at first, but you will notice that some of the breaks in the monologue have been extended by a few mere seconds if you play both versions successively. The film flows smoother as a result, and Barton's voice-acting shines even more.

Newly available textures have also been used to replace old default colours. An example being, for the wooden stool, the wood texture has replaced the old default brown colour in the remastered version. The vomit scene too gets a little neat makeover, which is perhaps the most noticeable change in the whole film. Although these graphical changes hardly influence the movie much, they are still very welcome and, if I'm honest, I'm not going to go back to the original version. If not for the little graphical improvements, for the better pacing of the movie.

Commentaries

Barton excels yet again with two very well-thought out commentaries, one for the original version and one for the remastered version. Both have obviously been given a great deal of thought and both are equally delightful to listen to, with the commentary of the remastered version concentrating more on the changes, as you would expect. What intrigued me most was Beth Rotheray's involvement in the development of the film (the timeline also reveals a lot about this too), and it makes it very clear that it is a personal movie, and knowing all this background, it makes watching Liquid Sunshine even more touching. Not many commentaries add to their respective movies as much as the commentaries of Liquid Sunshine do.

Production Notes

My favourite folder however in the Liquid Sunshine DVD is the one entitled "Production Notes". Inside this contains many delightful extras, including the commentaries in text form, the opening to Beth Rotheray's novel, an in-depth timeline, and a translation of the lyrics in the backing song played in Liquid Sunshine. An archive of the Liquid Sunshine thread and six lengthy reviews, all from Lock 'N Toad, have also been included in this folder for convenience's sake, I presume. The timeline highlights the key events in the past year and a half with a surprising amount of detail for such a short movie, and it's nice to see how much thought was given into creating the original Liquid Sunshine movie and it was warming to see that Rotheray played a huge part in the production of the film.

The translation of "The Flower of Carnage" too was interesting, in which similarities can be drawn from the lyrics and the movie itself. As for the commentaries, I have already covered them earlier in the review. There's nothing much to add there. But the most fascinating item in the whole DVD is the extract from Rotheray's novel. Wonderfully written, this piece was, I found, actually more touching than the film, which surprised me. Powerful words were used to sometimes describe how difficult it was to live this way, lying there, unable to move, filled with mostly sad memories. I'll hand-pick one of the sentences which particularly stood out for me:

"I imagine the doctors are either laughing merrily at home with their future ex-wives, or laughing merrily with their future wives in A&E."

Just like Barton's adaptation, the opening is thought-provoking, but in a different way. In the movie, during the first few viewings, I had to give it some thought to actually figure out what was happening. A year later, with this lodged in my mind (and because, being a written extract, you can re-read any paragraph over and over again), when I read this, it wasn't "I don't really understand this" or "That's tough on the guy. It must be depressing", but more of "Ouch, this is harsh. I feel really really sorry for this person". Don't get me wrong, Barton's movie was certainly really touching, and I was feeling sympathetic towards the poor bloke, but I felt that the writing had more of an impact and was more powerful. Now, after reading the opening, I respect Barton more for creating a masterpiece of a movie which somehow lives up to this superb piece of writing. Well done, I salute you.

Previews and Trailers

We now come to the final folder, which, as the name suggests, contains previews and trailers. There's really not much to report on here as it is better to watch them for yourselves, but what I will say is that I thoroughly enjoyed all of the previews and teaser trailers included, my favourite probably being the Liberation Day teaser trailer. I admit that I haven't taken this very seriously in the past, but I was genuinely impressed with the teaser, and I'll watch out for it more in the future. Obviously the Batman sneak peek is bound to amaze quite a few people, and the content, delivered a little like an interview, which Barton speaks to us about the upcoming film, was great - perhaps more directors could present teasers like this in the future? As for the Ringworld Act One teaser trailer, how much longer are you going to make us wait?

Conclusion

Out of all the 3DMM DVDs I have had the pleasure to look at, Liquid Sunshine comes out on top. This DVD is absorbing, engrossing, fascinating, impressive, brilliant, and whatever other similar words you can find, and it revolves around a movie that is just four minutes long. Are you on dial-up? Well, the DVD edition, zipped, is only fifteen megabytes in size. Bargain! Now you have no excuse whatsoever not to download this terrific DVD of a film praised a lot over the past year. From the remastered version, to the commentaries, to the timeline, to the opening of the novel, the quality of the extra content is stunning, and I'm wondering if this DVD edition can possibly be topped in the future.

Score: 95/100