One young company in Berlin has created the first art film to employ DVD's multifaceted, multitiered playback options. The husband-and-wife filmmaking team of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein has taken emerging DVD technology to its logical conclusion with The Last Cowboy, the first full-length feature from Nomad, their Berlin-based production house.

"We've had our eyes on the DVD thing since '95," said Tucker from his home in Potsdam, Germany. "There was a lot of hype in the beginning about how DVD was going to take over the world, and then no one made anything, which resulted in us really being the first to do [it]."

Epperlein, who grew up in the former East Germany, and Tucker, a Seattle native and longtime filmmaker, have effectively broken through the normally closed walls of standard film delivery &£45;- theaters, VHS, and CD-ROM &£45;- and created a film that allows the viewer to access a "seamless, random-access experience."

Despite the financial freedom inherent in shooting in Europe, the makers of The Last Cowboy managed to keep budgets even lower by editing with Mac OS. Macintosh-based tools such as Adobe's AfterEffects, Ultimatte, and ElectricImage helped Nomad create the film with a minimum of lab work and long hours, although the editing and rendering of 72,000 frames of film took approximately 70 days on a dual-processor Mac.

Technology is freeing up artists like those at Nomad to create nontraditional storytelling via desktop editing and online distribution. "In retrospect," said Epperlein, "it wasn't so terrible, and given the advances in processor speed and DV technology over the last year, we would do it again in a second."

(c) Wired News