Broadcast
With footage of nuns, Putin’s Russia and the 1990s rave scene, the shortlist for the tenth Focal International Awards is nothing if not eclectic.
In judging the Focal International Awards, jurors had a range of criteria to tick off, but three in particular cut across all categories: that footage is central to the success of the production, that the archive material has not been widely seen before, and that it has been used in a way that helps the understanding of the topic or illustrates it in a way that words alone cannot.
FOOTAGE IN A CURRENT AFFAIRS PRODUCTION
Arriving in Cairo on assignment on 24 January 2011, Omar Shargawi could hardly have predicted that the streets would erupt into revolution just one day later. With fellow filmmaker Karim El Hakim, Shargawi captured the events that occurred out of view of the world’s media, away from Tahrir Square, in back alleys and side streets.
In committing themselves to capturing footage the military wanted destroyed, they were arrested by the secret police, eventually fleeing with film hidden in a pram, material they used to assemble 1/2 Revolution (Globus, Denmark).
With Russia-based Masha Oleneva, fellow researcher Declan Smith says he faced “a running battle to try to persuade” news agencies and local broadcasters to part with their archive for Brook Lapping’s BBC2 doc Putin, Russia & The West, a revealing look at the rise to power of president Vladimir Putin.
“The challenge with Russian archives is that most are not organised as commercial entities, so the trick was trying to persuade people to go out of their way,” says Smith. “There’s still a certain amount of suspicion of producers from the West, for historical reasons.”
Some archives declined, but the pair sourced footage from AP, NTV, Rustavi TV, Channel 5 Kiev and TV 100, winning the admiration of former BBC archive producer-turned-juror Christine Whittaker.
“I know how hard it is to get material out of Russia and this programme contained a lot of material that had not been seen before,” she says.
Overcoming Eastern Bloc reluctance to hand over sensitive documents was also a factor in Ukraine: From Democracy To Chaos, from France’s Les Films Grain de Sable.
Drawing heavily on footage from the private collection of leading figures from Ukraine’s Orange revolution of 2004-5, including former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, this documents the country’s recent history, from the Soviet invasion to independence.
TV producer and judge Jerry Kuehl considers 1/2 Revolution “by far the best” of the trio. “It was very transparent about the limitations under which the camera operators worked,” he notes, comparing it to Brook Lapping’s film, which he says suffered from “the visual wallpaper that the producer – and not the film researcher – insisted on when they ran out of images.”
ARCHIVE RESTORATION/ PRESERVATION PROJECT
In preparation for a BBC Worldwide Blu-ray disc release of David Attenborough’s Life On Earth (1979) and Trials Of Life (1990), BBC Studios and Post Production created new HD masters derived from the original camera negatives.
Working with 104 rolls of 16mm A/B negs, the films were inspected, ultrasonically cleaned and scanned at 2K resolution using the Scanity film scanner. Once conformed, the timeline was graded on Nucoda Film Master before DVO Dust and Clarity was applied to clean up dirt, dust and grain automatically.
Each frame was then checked manually using Diamant DustBuster+ for any defects not removed in the automatic pass. The completed digital masters were returned for final review by BBC S&PP colourist Jonathan Wood before playout to produce the HD masters.
Although the BBC archive contained most of the original rushes, there were a few gaps “which caused a lot of panic”, says lead technologist Kevin Shaw, whose team hunted down the missing pieces from broadcast prints or intermediate tape.
“We treated both series, totalling 22 hours, as if they were brand new by going beyond restoration to give them a comprehensive DI,” he says. “Doing so revealed extraordinary detail. For example, in the original, a horde of ants resembled a liquid; they became much more vivid under the fresh grade.”
Fellow nominees include a collection of films by Dutch abstract animator Maarten Visser, owned by the Netherlands’ EYE Film Institute and restored by Haghefilm, and The Silent Hitchcock Project, a BFI and Deluxe restoration of nine classic silent films including The Pleasure Garden and The Lodger.
FOOTAGE IN A FACTUAL PRODUCTION
Once US producer Ark Media had secured access to White House insiders, foreign leaders, members of the Republican opposition and childhood friends of Bill Clinton, American Experience: Clinton co-producer Jamila Ephron went in search of materials that revealed the man behind the former US president’s public persona.
“Much of the news footage was shot in heavily controlled environments or from very long shots and we wanted the sense of being behind the scenes, right there in the Oval Office,” she says. “Still photos brought us closest to the intimacy we were looking for.”
For Fremantle Media Enterprises archive sales executive Wayne Lovell, this was “a well-researched, wellpaced doc that had all the usual suspects, such as his address to camera denying sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, with rare shots, such as of a young Clinton meeting JFK.” Eyepatch Productions’ Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story documents the life and murder of Booker Wright, an African-American waiter who became a household name in the 1960s following an NBCTV appearance in which he exposed the reality of black subservience to the white community.
Drawing on NBCU Archives, Getty Images, Iowa State University and University of Mississippi archives, the project proved “a compelling watch” for Lovell, who notes its use of “harrowing home-movie footage of a Klan meeting”.
For Jerry Kuehl, it was “a fine piece of detective work, and represented the best of what NBC managed to do in the time when the news division was not involved in infotainment”.
‘Radharc’ is the Irish word for ‘vision’ and was a unique collaboration between Ireland’s national broadcaster and a group of film-maker priests, attempting to promote Catholicism through television in the late 1950s.
Tyrone Productions’ The Radharc Squad mines a rich seam of more than 400 archive films shot in 75 countries and recovered, conserved and, in some cases, restored by RTÉ and the Irish Film Institute.
“The uniqueness of the footage almost felt like an undiscovered collection,” says Lovell, highlighting scenes of a nun in full habit operating a camera. “You don’t get to see that every day.”
For each nomination, Kuehl found the use of archive “decent and honest” but this film “was outstanding because it contained within itself a serious critique of what the nuns and priests were up to, and because the producers didn’t just junk the source material but arranged for it to be safeguarded.”
FOOTAGE IN AN ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTION
Method To The Madness Of Jerry Lewis (Mansfield Avenue Productions, US) is a fascinating insight into the career of a legendary comedian told from his own perspective, observes freelance producer Janet McBride.
“The footage and his interviews support each other beautifully to create a first-person narrative,” she says. “The scope and volume of material illustrate the many skills in which a film researcher must excel, such as copyright, format rights, artiste and music clearances.”
With wall-to-wall archive and comedic narration, researcher and four-time Focal Award-winner Phil Clark describes his primary task on BBC4’s The Great British Workout as “trying to find very specific footage to match to scripts and ideas that the writers have come up with.”
For this surreal examination of the British at their daftest in pursuit of health and fitness, Clark “sourced the most wonderful and mad archive”, says McBride. “Just when you thought things couldn’t get dafter, up would pop another terrifying contraption to drop the jaw.”
The originality of Fresh One’s Idris Elba’s How Clubbing Changed The World for Channel 4 is one reason it made the shortlist.
Executive producer Jeremy Lee says the aim was to illustrate 40 years of dance culture from the eyes of clubbers rather than hackneyed newsreels. Archive producer Derek Ham found amateur film shot by ravers and previously unbroadcast broadcast material such as Chief Superintendent Ken Tappenden’s undercover police footage from the 1990s M25 rave scene.
“The production faced the challenge of illustrating with footage what is in large part an audio genre, and the unusual nature of the subject required them to look beyond the usual archive sources,” says McBride.
AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Paul sargent is noted for leading the commercial access team of the Imperial War Museum’s fi lm archive, but Focal’s Lifetime Achievement Award recognises his signifi cant contribution to best practice and understanding of fi lm and archives over 30 years. “Paul’s dedication to the industry and his understanding of the history of film led him to recognise the vital need to ensure the survival of film handling skills,” says Jane Fish, the museum’s senior curator of fi lm archive.
“He respects the integrity of the image – not to crop or colourise it – and the ethics of archive: that fi lm is a historical document to be used in context.” As chair of the Focal International training committee, Sargent – who retired last year – was instrumental in setting up the Skillset Archive New Entrants Training Scheme to help ensure future access to legacy formats. “We still need people schooled in analogue fi lm production and skilled in technically handling fi lm, if archives are to be preserved,” Fish says.
FOOTAGE ON DIGITAL OR NON-TELEVISION PLATFORMS
The website for From the sea to the Land Beyond is produced by Illumina Digital in support of the eponymous BFI fi lm about the British coast, edited by Penny Woolcock with a soundtrack by British Sea Power.
Angela Saward, the Wellcome Library’s curator of moving image and sound, says the project is “playful” in its ability to engage users to create and send their own digital postcards from hundreds of clips, and “refreshing” in its use of a small amount of archive compared with other entries.
One project that managed to corral some 26 hours of content is the opera house, an online multimedia documentary that tells the story of the design and construction of Sydney’s iconic building and 40 years of performances. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation distilled transcriptions, photographs, audio, film and even 3D culled from ABC Archives, National Library of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive.
The richness and thoughtful nature of this major online resource impressed Saward and her fellow judges. “It goes very deep on a narrow subject and delivers information to engage a lot of different audiences – professionals, tourists, locals and public,” she says.
Compressing 40 years and 600 films from BBC arts strand Arena was the challenge facing series editor Anthony Wall.
“There are very few mechanisms to put a whole programme online so we turned the entire archive into a ‘hotel’ where you can check in and browse what the venue has to offer,” he says. “Our mission was to release archive from its image as something trapped in the dusty confi nes of a vault and bring it alive into the present and future.”
At Arena Hotel, guests might view instructions on how to make the perfect Martini courtesy of surrealist Luis Buñuel, or hear former England football manager Terry Venables discussing the co-creation of 1980s ITV detective series Hazell in a Dagenham pub.
The judges were “dazzled by its ambition”, says Saward. “You can spend a lot of time wandering around this virtual world.”
The tenth annual Focal International Awards, in association with AP Archive, takes place on 2 May
