Office by Alex Penny
I'm an MLS student on the archives track at the University of Maryland. I found myself posting a lot of articles, photos, links, etc. regarding archives, libraries, books, and other things on my Facebook, and felt it would be better to put these posts in a place specifically for the purpose of creating a fond of sorts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds), chronically things I find interesting about archives, libraries and books.
Oh and in the interest of citing sources, the title of the blog is from The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
Nothing quite like water damaged film in the morning.
Holy crap:
And it’s not like studios are making less data. There’s always more coming in.
Even worse, it’s extremely easy to lose data. “If I spend,” Horak says, “as we did on one restoration, $750,000 to preserve one film digitally, and then it goes into a computer somewhere and it disappears, that money’s gone.”
Think it doesn’t happen?
It does.
Five years after the first Toy Story came out, producers wanted to release it on DVD. When they went back to the original animation files, they realized that 20 percent of the data had been corrupted and was now unusable. Granted, digital was new at the time. Surely advances have made digital storage much less problematic?
Not really.
Fast-forward to Toy Story 2, which was almost erased from history. Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine. One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive. The movie started disappearing. First Woody’s hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.
Imagine the horror: 20 people’s work for two years, erased in 20 seconds. Animators were able to reconstitute the missing elements purely by chance: Pixar’s visual arts director had just had a baby, and she’d brought a copy of the movie — the only remaining copy — with her to work on at home.
Legitimately geeking out.
Hope and heartbreak: We found a 1951 35mm nitrate fine grain of Bergman’s mold-ravaged SUMMER INTERLUDE! Then we opened the can.
So I’ve been thinking about this all day…this doesn’t look like nitrate decomp, but rather acetate deterioration. For example, here’s a photo of a reel with nitrate decomp:
Whereas here is a reel with vinegar syndrome, and some early spoking, similar to what you see in the picture:
So I’m wondering if this is actually nitrate or not. Any other film archivists/film preservationists have thoughts?
(via bestmatedonnanoble)
Hope and heartbreak: We found a 1951 35mm nitrate fine grain of Bergman’s mold-ravaged SUMMER INTERLUDE! Then we opened the can.
“To restore an old film does not mean it must become a brand new one. The restored version should be as faithful to the original release as possible.
Therefore, the restoration of old films is never just technical. It requires a team that knows about films.
…
‘That’s why I strongly recommended film experts and the original cast and crew members join the restoration,’ says Wu Jueren, a film restoration researcher.
The problem is, many of the original cast and crew members are too old or have passed away, which makes the repair of classic films more urgent.
…
Wu, the researcher, believes classic films deserve the effort. ‘Just like Shakespeare’s works and Mozart’s music, classic films are the fruits of human creativity and civilization,’ he says. ‘They kind of change people’s way of looking at the world.’”
For the Love of Film Preservation Blogathon: May 13-18th
Mark your calendars.
“Is it acceptable to destroy cultural objects as if they were land mines? This is a question faced by archivists in Germany, where many of the country’s historical films were shot on explosive nitrocellulose. A bitter fight has broken out in Germany over whether the film should be preserved or destroyed.”
Wow this article…just. UGH. I’m sorry, I get really frustrated about this. Yes, nitrate film is dangerous, WHEN IT ISN’T KEPT UNDER THE PROPER CONDITIONS. But I’m so sick of people thinking it’s ok to just destroy the films once they’re transferred to safety stock. Unless they are completely deteriorated, you don’t destroy them…you just don’t. I think my biggest frustration is just how much misinformation there is when it comes to things like this, and labeling all nitrate film as “highly explosively” is just, no pun intended, fueling the fires of misinformation.
With a slight nod toward the Academy’s announcements of the Oscar nominees this morning, there’s something more interesting which they’ve recently released which hasn’t gotten nearly as much press, but portends to be much more vital in the long run.
As books enter the digital age and we watch the continued convergence of rich media like video and audio enter into e-book formats with announcements last week like Apple’s foray into digital publishing, the ability to catalog, maintain and store many types of digital media is becoming an increasing problem. Last week the Academy released part two of their study on strategic issues in archiving and accessing digital motion picture materials in their report entitled The Digital Dilemma 2. Many of you will find it interesting/useful, particularly in light of the Academy’s description
The Digital Dilemma 2 reports on digital preservation issues facing communities that do not have the resources of large corporations or other well-funded institutions: independent filmmakers, documentarians and nonprofit audiovisual archives.The link below provides some additional information as well as the ability (with a simple login) to download a .pdf copy of their entire report.
http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma/
There is also a recent Variety article which gives a more fully fleshed out overview of many of the issues at hand.
In the meanwhile, if you’re going to make a bet in this year’s Oscar pool, perhaps putting your money on the “Digital Dilemma” might be more useful than on Brad Pitt for Best Actor in “Moneyball”?
