DVD Special Features Haven’t Disappeared — They’ve Just Become ‘Arcane’
Jorge Soto fell in love in the early ‘00s — in love with filmmaking, that is. In no small part, this came out of watching the features and behind-the-scenes documentaries included in the Extended Editions of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” series. Like a lot of the millennial cohort lucky enough to hit their teens during the DVD boom, Soto grew up not only watching shows and movies but consuming the multiple audio commentaries included in box sets, finding the Easter eggs hidden in the menus, and getting a detailed look at the craft and effort behind making our favorite visual stories.
Like a lot of us who endlessly scroll Netflix, too, Soto laments the lack of behind-the-scenes material that comes packaged with a given film or show — sure, little featurettes are out there on YouTube, and every HBO series has a podcast now. But the onus is on the viewer to seek out that extra material on a different platform; it no longer feels, as those “LOTR” box sets promised, like we can have appendices.
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Unlike the rest of us, though, Soto’s doing something about that. He is the director of production for GKIDS, one of a precious few distributors committed to physical media releases. The company has been putting out Blu-rays, 4K UHD releases, and collectors’ edition steelbooks for all things Studio Ghibli and “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” among others, and is about to release Season 1 of “Arcane: League of Legends” at standard, steelbook, and collector’s edition price points. Soto led the charge on creating the bonus featurettes that he, and “Arcane” fans everywhere, would want to see in the world.
“Arcane” is an interesting edge-case because the beloved animated series from Riot Games and French animation studio Fortiche — which struck like a blended 2D/3D lightning bolt from the “League of Legends” franchise of games — has been out since 2021. A five-part documentary series about the making of Season 1, “Bridging the Rift,” has been available on YouTube and will be included in the GKIDS Blu-Ray as well. But with Season 2 on the horizon for a November 9 premiere, Soto and the GKIDS team were able to dig deep into the existing BTS material — plus fan reactions, memes, and art (yes, GKIDS team members are lurking on Reddit)— to build documentaries around what was missing, or what deserved even deeper consideration.
“There’s a lot to consider when we decide what the bonus features are going to be. Since we’re releasing films produced in other countries, there’s often really great bonus features made in the production of the film — so what can we supplement? What can we localize to make it accessible to our own audiences?” Soto told IndieWire. “It’s not every project that will want 82 minutes of bonus content. But obviously, ‘Arcane’ is a big moment.”
Soto directed five behind-the-scenes features, totaling 82 minutes, that go into a level of detail on particular topics. “Bridging the Rift” simply couldn’t do it. This includes the Jinx (Ella Purnell) and Ekko (Reed Shannon) showdown, breakdowns of how Fortiche adapts live-action camera language to make emotional scenes more impactful and completely lets loose in the anarchy of a fight, and the development of Mel (Toks Olagundoye) as a wholly original character for the series, among others.
“We went from like, ‘Oh, these are some audio commentaries we can do’ to ‘Let’s give the folks at Fortiche the scenes, give them the whole show, and let them break down bit by bit what’s exciting about their work,'” Soto said. “They had just finished Season 2 as well. So looking back at Season 1 and seeing how things had changed was an interesting takeaway.”
It’s a truly impressive lineup of directors, writers, production designers, character designers, animators, and voice actors who participate in the bonus features for “Arcane” Season 1, and even more impressive that Soto only had two days to shoot the material — simultaneously at Riot Studios in Los Angeles and Fortiche in France. Soto said they had to jury-rig a very quick internal translation so that the editing team in New York could get going on cutting interviews to inform the second day of shooting.
“[The translation workflow] was super helpful, just to do a very quick translation, then do the editing of the piece, send it to motion graphics, and do a whole coloring pass on it and sound design,” Soto said.
Color, shot background and composition, lighting, and sound are all things that are usually invisible in most documentaries, let alone bonus content, but Soto had to think about that on the fly. “It makes the visual story a little bit more diverse and interesting,” Soto said. “I just wanted to have fun with what we’re making. Whenever I have the opportunity to make the interview setting ring some sort of truth or narrative sense, it’s fun for me.”
GKIDS Director of Home Entertainment Alison Kozberg agreed that a sense of fun and love for the material are what animates much of the decision-making behind creating bonus content in their physical media releases. It’s a commitment that has only been reinforced throughout the post-COVID years, as the fickle nature of online media catalogs has become more and more apparent.
“There was a moment during the pandemic where I turned on a 4K UHD and I just felt like I had slid into a state of luxury,” Kozberg told IndieWire. “Just that moment of not having to arm wrestle with my internet speed and being able to watch something I loved in a beautiful way was thrilling. If anyone hasn’t done it recently, I really recommend spending time with films and TV shows you love in a way that does not require your internet to be in tip-top shape because sometimes your internet will betray you.”
There are, fortunately, different levels of luxury to the GKIDS “Arcane” releases, from a standard Blu-ray to a collectors’ edition that includes art pieces meant to feel like they’ve been smuggled out of Piltover and a dice set in the style and colors of the series. In true “Arcane” style that is both cheeky and heartbreaking, the steelbooks come in dueling styles that feature sundered sisters Jinx and Vi (Hailee Steinfeld). But even on the standard edition, Kozberg wants there to be bonus content that does exactly what the behind-the-scenes material has always done: Act as a tribute to the work of making the show and creatively inspire the next generation of filmmakers.
“We do think about our releases as a tribute to the shows and characters that [fans] love. I know that not everyone watches on-disc bonus features, but they are an exciting opportunity to slow down and really think about how a scene was crafted; to look at something more than once can be so thrilling,” Kozberg said. “I think really taking those moments to look at how something you love is constructed is so creatively inspiring.”
“Arcane: League of Legends” Season 1 will be available on Blu-ray and UHD on September 24.
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