Stomp Out Loud

Take a bunch of guys and gals, give them some sticks, towels, brooms and bins, get them to slap, kick, scrape and bang them all together and what have you got? STOMP. OUT LOUD!!!

There's no other way to describe it. Ever been sitting somewhere and then you start tapping away on something, move to a different object and bring up a different sound and then slowly mould a rythym out of it all? Well, imagine a whole bunch of people doing something very similar but on a grander scale with alot more precision and timing.

It truly is an amazing twist on your classic musical instruments.

Ok, the video is probably the only aspect that suffers on this disc. Basically, the black levels are not correct and at times you can literally see how the mpeg encoding process has just taken a chunk of shadow and said "you're a dark bluey/grey square".

It's a pity as the bit-rate is pretty high so it all comes down to the source material that was used to create this disc. I'd say it wasn't perfectly calibrated as we are used to on dvd but that's not to take away from the rest of the video transfer. The Brooms sketch suffers the most but the rest are pretty fine.

From the outset we get a nice view of manhattan as we see our cast hanging from a massive billboard as they begin their routine. It' clear already that the colors seem a little washed out, maybe even leaning toward the yellowy tinge associated with dated footage. Some sketches look quite good, some look grainy, others look fine, but I wouldn't put it up there as one of the best looking discs from Warner Vision.

Ok, the audio quality is an interesting area in regards to this disc. It states on the cover and via the onscreen display of my pioneer that the sound is in 5.1 yet the opening credits reveal the dolby surround logo. From what I heard, I think that it is dolby surround encoded into the 5.1 channels rather than 4.0/2.0.

There are scenes where the sound seemed muffled. In the second scene when we are travelling within the cabin of a pick-up, we don't get as much clarity as we would expect. But then again, some of the other scenes seem to exhibit a good dynamic range and good use of the surround area.

In particular, the kitchen scene has the camera man taking us around the kitchen as all hands are creating rythym from all areas. As we follow the camera man we hear sounds moving into the rear and panning across the front etc etc. The sewer track provides and interesting artificial experience which I quite enjoyed.

A whole swag of notes ranging from the making of both out loud and brooms to cast and crew details. Other than that, we are given an alternate mpeg 2.0 audio track aswell as a picture disc which seems to be common with WV of late.

I can only recommend this to STOMP fans. It would have been nice if the video was of better source quality and the audio was opened up a little more, yet this is still a fine disc.