Hollywood Style

DVDs are in the making at a high-tech studio downtown.

The first commercial DVDs (digital versatile disks) ever to be produced in Hawaii are being created in downtown Honolulu – not in a multimillion-dollar high-rise building, but in a 1,200-square-foot apartment-turned studio on Nuuanu Avenue. The company, Juniroa Productions, is a women-owned organization with six employees. And the DVDs are a 1-hour documentary about Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, and a Hawaiian Values Curriculum for the Department of Education. Both are slated to be released by the end of the year. Although this is Juniroa Productions’ first year at DVD-making, the company has been in the video, motion graphics and documentary-producing business since 1985. Juniroa boasts more than 70 local documentaries and training videos, including Hawaii’s first television series Enduring Pride (1986) and the first local health program On Target (1986). The company generates approximately $250,000 in revenues annually.

With the new DVD projects, Juniroa will have a technological edge over its competitors. “DVD provides the types of options we need in today’s global world, such as multi-audio tracks that allow encoding of up to nine languages on any single production,” says Heather Giugni, president and general manager of the company. “DVD is a broadband in a box. Add Web connectivity, and you have an immersive, media-rich experience that is no longer static and changing.” Guigni and Esther Figueroa, a producer, writer, editor and Ph.D, co-founded Juniroa Productions 16 years ago.In addition to the DVDs for Sen. Inouye and the Department of Education, the company last June submitted a bid to produce a DVD library archive for Kamehameha Schools.

Randy Coo, DVD developer; Heather Giugni, co-founder; Esther Figueroa, co-founder; and Debbie Miller, motion graphics director.

Figueroa and Guigni that month also had been talking to relatives of the late surfer Eddie Aikau, about a documentary that will be co-produced with Aikau’s biographer Stuart Coleman. Next on the company’s production wish list is a DVD for the local feature film Fire in the Womb, which is being shot in Fiji by Te Make Productions. “We hope to be the first company in Hawaii that makes a Hollywood-style DVD,” Figueroa says. “DVD is the next step. It holds about 20 times the amount of information a CD holds.” Not only are DVDs smarter than compact and laser disks, but their popularity last year resulted in more than 8.5 million shipped DVD players in the United States. That’s a 2,428 percent growth over DVD shipments (350,000) the first time it hit the market in 1997. Today, there are more than 10,000 DVD video titles available in the nation.

That’s good incentive for Juniroa’s executives, who invested more than $200,000 for an Avid editing system, plus another $25,000 for Sonic Solutions software. The encoding and authoring process for any DVD production is far from cheap. Hollywood-style productions, which include trailers, multiple screens and audio tracks, easily cost more than $20,000. A basic, 120-minute DVD with no- frills footage and menus can cost around $3,000.

But dollar signs aside, Juniroa’s role in Hawaii’s high-tech industry is priceless. “This is an exciting step for Hawaii,” says Randy Cook, DVD developer for Juniroa Productions. He previously was a DVD developer and studio manager at Interactive Film and Music in Arizona. “As the technology industry continues to expand here in Hawaii, I think we will really see a reversal in the brain drain. Kids with mainland experience are dying to come home to strut their tech stuff back in the place they love.”

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