Future-Proofing Your Movie Masters

Plus: The Best Visual Effects You Didn’t See

Author

Steve
March 19, 2024

Hello Hollywood tech nerds!

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Future-Proofing Your Movie Masters

Keep (your digital media masters) secret. Keep (your digital media masters) safe!

Gandalf (sort of)

The Hollywood Reporter magazine recently published an interesting look at the growing concern over digital media preservation in Hollywood. In an age where finished films can just never see a release, it’s important to codify your film and TV archival efforts to avoid the fate of the many lost films of the celluloid era. Some examples provided in the article include “Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Oscar-winning The Patriot.” Gone and never to be seen again!

While the headline is a bit clickbaity and implies this is a major issue in Hollywood (“It’s a Silent Fire”: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis), the article itself is a bit more circumspect. It suggests the major problem is not really within the major studios, which typically have broad institutional safeguards for their content, but moreso independent filmmakers.

Experts note that indie filmmakers, operating under constrained financial circumstances, are most at risk of seeing their art disappear. “You have an entire era of cinema that’s in severe danger of being lost,” contends screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, a board member of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

His cohort on the board, historian Leonard Maltin, notes that this era could suffer the same fate as has befallen so many silent pictures and midcentury B movies. “Those films were not attended to at the time — not archived properly because they weren’t the products of major studios,” he says.

In part, the indie filmmakers’ digital crisis can be traced to inadequate storage safeguards. (Innumerable thumb drives and hard drives are half-forgotten, only to age and corrupt, in closets, under beds and on garage shelves.)

But also, it speaks to the fragile ecosystem that ostensibly supports filmmakers, from overextended financiers to ephemeral distributors. “They’re worried about getting the project picked up and getting it out there; proper preservation isn’t thought about so much,” observes Gregory Lukow, chief of the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, which now digitizes physical media.

This echoes some of my own experience. I’ve seen your hard drives, indie movie producers, and they do not inspire confidence!

I spoke to a friend who used to work for a streaming service which often used studio content, and they had this to say:

The primary issue with the studios is not the preservation of their new movies, but of their older content that still lives on a tape somewhere. We requested a 1980s drama from one of the major studios, and the files they sent us were riddled with duplicate frames, so they had to re-ingest the entire series from the original tapes. That’s the danger - they had an entirely automated digitization process with no oversight. If those tapes failed before we caught the error, that’s an entire show probably lost for good.

Scary stuff! If you have preservation or archival needs, drop my bosses a line at [email protected]

The Best Visual Effects You Didn’t See

Last week I wrote about the incredible (and incredibly-cheap) visual effects of Godzilla Minus One. This week I thought I’d touch on two other Oscar-nominated films with significant visual effects work, although neither was nominated specifically for VFX. This is because in both cases, the effects are intended to be invisible.

First up is Alexander Payne’s new Christmas classic The Holdovers. Set at a New England prep school at Christmastime in the 1970s, visual effects house Crafty Apes fully winterized the film’s shooting locations, as seen in the below reel.

I was actually shocked to see this! The winter effects in the film are seamless. Sometimes effects are all about what you don’t see.

Another 2023 Oscar winner is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, whose VFX company One of Us removed onscreen production cameras and equipment and created the buildings of Auschwitz for the film’s disturbing setting.

The film won a much-deserved Academy Award for Best Sound, but its invisible effects are also crucial to its storytelling.

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Have we reached peak AI? (link)

Inside the epic streaming showdown over live sports. (link)

TikTok takes a page out of the Uber playbook. (link)