Witajcie w Zyciu (aka Welcome to Life) - 1997 Banned Polish Documentary about Amway - Remastered & Translated to English RELEASED
So, before I get into the technical side, i.e. “The remastering & translation” work done by me on this project, let me present you with the information on the documentary. Those of us old enough, remember a time when there were multiple MLM (multi-level-marketing) schemes, like back in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s, such as Avon, Mary Kay, Primerica, NuSkin, and Amway.
Amway made it’s way into Poland in November of 1992. This documentary, presented to us by Henryk Dederko, shows us the ludicrous practices of the company and, especially, of the people that work for Amway. It also shows footage from “Newtork TwentyOne,” a large group, working under Amway, that helped sell people on Amway and on it’s own “education materials.” We have seen “exposés” of MLM companies before, but what makes this documentary stand out, is the “in-your-face” style of presentation, and the fact that this film is the ONLY one that has been banned in Poland, since 1989 when the country was finally liberated from the rule of socialism or living behind “The Iron Curtain.” Basically, in 1997, Amway Poland and Network TwentyOne separately sued the makers of the film for defamation and copyright violations. The director and producer were later acquitted on the charge of disseminating false information. The film, banned for 12 years, was one of the highly anticipated movies of 2009’s Warsaw Film Festival and was dubbed by the promoters as a “scary movie about brainwashing” that depicts hard-sell “pep rallies” and distributors stating meetings were operated similar to the Communist Party and methods of recruitment that confusingly resembled those of a sect. A best-seller on the local video black market, the film was banned while the suit proceeded. In 2001 a regional court ruled in favor of Network 21; however, in 2004 the Warsaw Regional Court dismissed Amway’s civil lawsuit. On appeal Amway won the case and the producers were ordered to pay a fine to a children’s charity and publish a public apology. As of 2009 the film was still banned due to an ongoing case brought by “private individuals” ridiculed in the film. On December 18th, 2012 the court ruled that film can be screened, but the makers have to remove “false information”, as the screen near the end of the movie stated that 30% of company income is generated by sales of training materials and that the vast majority of its profits are shared only by the tiny fraction of top distributors. This is not the only court case, so the film is still banned on other grounds. The Court of Appeal in Warsaw, March 26th, 2014. finally ruled that the producer of the film, Henryk Dederko, does not have to apologize to Amway for false data on the distribution of its income. At the same time, the court upheld the judgment from December 18th, 2012, pursuant to which TVP (as the owner of the rights to the film) can not distribute the film including the “false information” about Amway. The film, however, may be screened, if the relevant passages referred to by the Court of final judgments in the process of Amway (that judgment dated. Dec. 18, 2012) and in the process brought by Amway distributors (judgment dated October 27th, 2005) are removed. Basically, this means that this film will NEVER be available in its original form and any possible future release will be censored/edited.
Now, this project is VERY personal for me, as my parents were actually conned into this scam, to the point of leaving the United States (after immigrating to the US in 1982) to go back to Poland for the official opening of the Amway business in November of 1992. What makes it more interesting, is that the man that “convinced” them to do this, was the founder of Network TwentyOne - Jim Dornan (the crazy looking, grey-haired guy, that leaps of the ground in one of the clips during the intro of the film.) I can personally verify the authenticity of a lot of the earlier footage contained in the film, as I was there when the original sources were being taped (my folks took me to a lot of these meetings, pep-rallies, and seminars.) The footage shown is not exaggerated AT ALL. In fact, some of these assholes praised my folks for bringing me along to these “seminars” and would grill me on when am I going to start being a part of the “Amway family,” even though I was only around twelve-thirteen years old at the time. Anyway, fortunately I was able to convince my folks that this was a huge con, that people that were their friends in the past now hate them because of this business, and that life in the states was better (plus I was home-sick) that we finally came back to the states in January of 1997, a few months before this film was put together (something I grateful for, as Amway “tanked” after that and we wouldn’t have been able to afford the trip back.)
Anway, due to the fact that the original source of this is a bootleg SECAM VHS tape, which was digitized into a crappy 352x256 Divx5 @~800kbps file with crappy 96kbps MP3 sound, this was a HUGE challenge to clean up, especially due to the fact that the source, when being digitized, had a “rolling rainbows” through the entire screen artefacts problem. Then there’s the low bitrate, the crappy small size, the completely f*cked gamma/contrast/brightness/gamma/saturation. A HUGE THANX to Doctor M, for a suggestion made here, on these forums, in some old thread, where I was able to fix a lot (over 90%) of the “rolling rainbows” artefacts using the Chroma Noise Reduction filter in VirtualDubMod. All of the work on this, was done with the source file being worked on in a lossless YUV 4:2:0 format. After filtering it with the mentioned filter, I noticed that the result is ok, but that the first few frames after each scene change had a chroma bleed of the last frames before the scene change, so I had a “Eureka!” moment and reversed the entire source video and then ran the filter through it this way too. Now, I had to combine each scene, first half from reversed video (after I reversed it one more time to play forward properly) and the second half from the video filter forward. This gave me a nice final result, where over 90% of the “rolling rainbow” artefacts are gone (as is illustrated in the screenshot comparisons.) Next, I had to UpRez this back to a proper 720x576 PAL/SECAM original frame size. After that, I adjusted the contrast center, fixed the brightness, adjusted the gamma slightly, adjusted saturation, used a very customized sharpening filter and “Voilà.” Now, we have very nice video, but the audio was still atrocious. Not only was it a lossy, very low bitrate source, but it also sounded like the volume was WAY too high when this was being digitized, therefore there is a lot of distortion and clipping. I worked on this audio for about a week, running it through multiple stages of filtering and combining “final” edits with files that were edited using different sets of filters and then re-filtering those combined files and… yeah, if you think it’s a headache to read, imagine the pain I went through editing this together. The final result is a “B.” It’s not perfect, but it’s clean enough to understand, the background hiss and hum are gone and it sounds like a typical rip of a VHS tape that has been cleaned a little bit. So, after this came the hardest part of this project, and that’s the proper translation of the entire film, including certain “on-screen” text that has relevant information. After nearly two weeks of adjusting timing, translating, re-editing the translations, formatting, etc. I had a complete "product. " Next, I had to encode all of this back into a lossy format, as the whole time I was working in lossless. I decided to make two “versions” of the “remaster.” The first, is an all Polish version, and the second, is a HARD SUBBED English version. The reason I decided to do HARDSUBS is because I wanted to have control over formatting. With all of the “on-screen” and “spoken language” translations, I really wanted to make sure that everything shows up on-screen at the right time and the right place and this is harder to do customizing a subtitle file, than to just do HARD SUBS. Therefore, there are two versions on the PAL DVD5 release. Each, has video at 720x576@25fps@~5000kbps with 2 Channel, Stereo AC3 @384kbps sound.
By request, I can make an NTSC DVD5 available, as I already have it encoded and authored, but it sounds a little funny (slow) due to the fact that I just slowed down the entire thing from 25fps to 23.976fps to avoid compromising the integrity of the video any more. These will be released exclusively on the spleen.
There is also a 512x384@25fps@1500kbps with 2 channel, stereo AC3 @224kbps sound, 696MB AVI file that can be found on public trackers.
Now, as promised, here are screenshot comparisons between the source (re-sized to 720x540 for easy comparison) and the “Remaster” (re-sized to 720x540 to maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio):
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/91415
Any and all comments are welcome. Enjoy;o)
Oh yeah, for those of you looking on public trackers, just search for: Witajcie.W.Zyciu.aka.Welcome.To.Life.1997.Remastered.ENGLISH.HARDSUB.
