Broadcast
Ahead
of next week’s ceremony announcing the winners of the 2015 Focal
International Awards, Broadcast casts an eye over the films nominated
in the main categories.
The
12th Focal International Awards, in association with AP Archive,
celebrates achievement in the use of stock and archival footage. This
year, the awards attracted 265 submissions from 24 countries. A panel
of 50 jurors then whittled the long list down to three for each of 17
categories. These are the films competing in six key categories.
CURRENT
AFFAIRS
Silvered
Water, Syria Self-Portrait
Producer:
Les Films d’Ici/ Pro Action Films
Archive:
User-generated
One
of a growing number of overseas entries, this French-Syrian
co-production, composed mainly of eye-witness footage uploaded to
social media, really stood out.
“YouTube
and user-generated footage from mobile phones is the new source of
archive,” says juror Wayne Lovell, clip sales executive at
Fremantle Media Archive. “The images are compelling and harrowing
but treated with sensitivity and used almost like a conversation
between two people – one in the West and the other in Syria –
filming and uploading videos of incidents we would otherwise not
see.”
Paisley:
A Life
Producer:
BBC Northern Ireland
Archives:
BBC; ITN Source/UTV; RTÉ; AP Archive; Fremantle Media Archive
Paisley:
A Life was a “captivating and comprehensive insight” into the
life and times of the controversial preacher-turned-first minister of
Northern Ireland, says Lovell. BBC Northern Ireland has “used lots
of footage you would expect to see, combined with many new sources
that reveal a more rounded and human side” to the caricature of the
vocal politician, including cine-film of his wedding.
This
World: Terror At The Mall
Producer:
Amos Pictures for BBC
Archives:
CCTV; Red Cross; amateur footage
This
World: Terror At The Mall documents the 2013 assault on Nairobi’s
Westgate Mall from every angle. A thousand hours of security camera
footage, together with stills photographs captured in 12fps bursts by
a photojournalist, Red Cross material shot on a DSLR and bystander
footage shot on an iPhone form the visual and narrative base of the
doc.
The
creative, logistic and technical challenges were enormous, explains
producer/director Dan Reed: “There was only a very basic map of the
Mall, so we forensically studied the CCTV footage, painstakingly
constructing a useable map. From this we were able to start
identifying the different contributors in the footage.”
Lovell
says: “The way it was cut reminded me of watching 9/11 develop in
real-time TV.”
FACTUAL
Alfred
And Jakobine
Producer:
Start In Morocco Films
Archive:
Home-movie footage
This
touching romance between 1955 newlyweds Alfred and Jakobine is
illustrated with home-movie footage of their epic round-the-world
trip in a London taxi.
The
biggest technical challenge was getting a good telecine print from
the original films without destroying them.
“The
film had been sitting in cans for decades,” explains producer Rob
Fletcher. “We couldn’t be sure what the quality of the print was
like, and we had no idea of the pictorial content. We telecined the
film very early on in the process in the US – not at great quality
but good enough for us to understand the content and the film’s
fragile state.
“The
next telecine was intended to be the last, so we spent all we could
muster at Deluxe Media. The film was visibly degrading every time the
spools were run, so we were very happy that we had the best print we
could before the films became unusable.”
American
Experience: Last Days In Vietnam
Producers:
Moxie Firecracker Films; WGBH Educational Foundation
Archives:
T3 Media; NBC Universal; ABC News; Sonuma; ITN Source
A
rich archive underscores American Experience: Last Days In Vietnam,
from US producers Moxie Firecracker Films and WGBH Educational
Foundation. In particular, the documentary reveals how a number of
diplomats and military operatives engaged in unsanctioned, and often
makeshift, operations in a desperate bid to save as many South
Vietnamese lives as possible.
Night
Will Fall
Producers:
Spring Films; Angel TV; Cinephil
Archives:
Imperial War Museum; ITN Source; Footage Farm; Getty Images; British
Pathé
German
Concentration Camps Factual Survey is the official British
documentary on the holocaust made by Sidney Bernstein, Richard
Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock, restored for cinema release by the
Imperial War Museum. Night Will Fall is the story of that remarkable
production and features footage from Bridgeman Footage’s Buff Films
collection, including a rare interview with cameraman Mike Lewis, who
filmed the liberation.
“The
footage is harrowing and there were important questions about how to
contextualise that without falling into a pornography of violence,”
says producer Sally Angel. “We had to be respectful of the source
material and remove ourselves as much as possible.”
Newsreels
from British, Russian and American troops were pooled in 1945, some
of it staged several days after the camp’s liberation, but Angel
used the device of a film running through a camera to highlight
Bernstein’s carefully composed and unstaged footage.
ARTS
Darcey’s
Ballerina Heroines
Producer:
Leopard Films for BBC2
Archives:
Getty Images/BBC Motion Gallery; Royal Opera House; PBS Great
Performances; Mosfilm; BFI
For
this BBC2 documentary, prima ballerina Darcey Bussell presents an
authoritative history of the best ballets and finest performers from
18th century France to 1950s America.
Collections
including Royal Opera House and Mosfilm “were essential in showing
what made these women so extraordinary”, observes producer Fiona
Morris. “We asked former Soviet archives to let us have material,
which was tricky, as was understanding what material was entirely
owned by the archive licensing the footage and which elements had
more complex underlying rights to be considered. For example, set
designers and directors of the original ballets featured in the
clips.”
Natan
Producer:
Screenworks
Archives:
Private collection Mme l’Herbier; Pathé (France); GPA; INA;
Lobster Films
This
documentary has helped rehabilitate forgotten and tragic cinema
pioneer Bernard Natan. The Romanian Jew made his name in France as
owner of Pathé in the 1920s and played a key role in the development
of cinemascope and television before he was controversially disgraced
and imprisoned, later dying in Auschwitz.
“With
a project revolving around cinema, you clearly have a strong archive,
but researcher Christine Leteux helped us uncover a number of films
from private collections and newsreels, including an experimental
360-degree shot that Natan made of his head, which we used
prominently,” explains producer Paul Duane.
Regarding
Susan Sontag
Producer:
Question Why Films
Archives:
National Archives and Records Administration; Getty Images/BBC Motion
Gallery; Library of Congress; T3 Media; Oddball Film and Video
US
producer Question Why Films’ documentary draws on footage and
stills from 130 archives. Innovative use of footage includes
“projecting archival materials through water, onto surfaces and
letters, and combining and layering them in collage sequences to
convey a greater sense of the inner life of its central character,”
explains producer/ director Nancy Kates.
SPORT
An
Ordinary Hero
Producer:
BT Sport Films
Archives:
BP Video Library; Brunswick Films; Duke Video; Fremantle Media; The
Hailwood Estate
Archive
was vital in bringing to life the colourful story of motorcycle
legend Mike Hailwood, but interviews and race footage show only one
side of the man.
“In
building trust with family and friends, we began to get access to
some extraordinary colour home-movie material that showed Hailwood’s
demeanour as markedly different from how he was presented by
mainstream media,” says producer/director Jon Carey.
Road
Producer:
DoubleBand Films
Archives:
BBC Northern Ireland; Ulster TV; DoubleBand Films
Using
archive from broadcasts and home movies to tell the tragic back-story
of the road-racing Dunlop brothers, feature documentary Road has
enjoyed extensive international distribution. “Key to this success
is our use of archive,” says Dermot Lavery, codirector and producer
for DoubleBand Films. “The footage had to do more than just
illustrate past events. It had to help deliver and sustain the
emotional narrative at the heart of the film. Throughout the edit, we
worked hard to make sure it worked on both levels.”
Slaying
The Badger
Producer:
Passion Pictures
Archives:
INA; ASO; Cor Vos; Offside/L’Equipe; ESPN
With
Lance Armstrong’s reputation in the dust, the only official US
winner of the Tour de France is Greg LeMond, in 1986. Passion
Pictures’ Slaying The Badger assembles archive to reveal the
friendship and rivalry of LeMond and French teammate Bernard Hinault
(aka The Badger).
“This
production exceeded my expectations by using rarely seen,
difficult-to-find footage in an attractive way,” says juror Massimo
Moretti, library commercial development manager at StudioCanal.
WILDLIFE
AND NATURAL HISTORY
Animal
Fight Club (series two)
Producer:
Arrow Media for Nat Geo Wild
Archives:
Getty Images/BBC Motion Gallery; National Geographic Creative;
Framepool; Nature Footage/Footage Search; Richard Smedley
For
juror Ben Jones, head of motion at Science Photo Library, each
natural history nominee illustrates different uses of archive: “One
presents a technical editing challenge, one uses historical archive
and another uses existing material to create an entirely new
programme.”
Animal
Fight Club uses freezeframe, close-up zooms, CGI, slow-motion replay
and pop-up infographics to recreate and examine the battles of
creatures such as warthogs and hippos.
“With
excellently researched material from multiple sources, the show is
almost 100% archive, with creative construction and punchy scripting
and music,” says Carol O’Callaghan, co-ordinator of Focal’s
wildlife preliminary jury.
ORBI:
The Magic Of Yellowstone
Producer:
BBC Earth Productions
Archive:
BBC
This
project was designed specifically for ORBI, a Japanese attraction
built by Sega, the centrepiece of which is a curved screen displaying
6K to 12K images at 40m x 8m in a 5:1 aspect ratio with 22.2 channel
audio. Apart from some hi-res timelapse material, it is composed
entirely of HD archive footage.
“Trying
to fill this enormous screen with images that were not big enough
required new technical and creative techniques,” says producer/
director Ben Roy. “You can’t just blow the images up or you lose
resolution, so we had to composite images to fill the space.”
It
also required new grammar: with a screen of this scale, the audience
needs to be directed from left to right via audio and visual clues.
“We called it the ‘Wimbledon effect’,” says Roy.
The
Pristine Coast
Producer:
Juggernaut Pictures
Archives:
Film-makers Dick Harvey and Twyla Roscovich; Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation; The Fisherman News
Producer/director
and chief researcher Scott Renyard took four and a half years to
complete The Pristine Coast, much of it spent uncovering the troubled
marine ecosystem off the coast of British Columbia.
“I
used archive to verify actual events or to disprove notions put
forward by proponents of opennet fish farming,” he says. “Fish
farmers have claimed, for example, that wild fish do not go in the
pens. Footage I obtained from film-maker Dick Harvey showed that this
is not true.”
He
adds: “The archive material shaped the scope of the issue and
supported the claims made by some of my interview subjects. It was
invaluable in turning a small story about the impact of fish farming
on wild salmon into a story with global implications.”
O’Callaghan
says: “This hard-hitting, campaigning film may not have production
values as high as the other two, but it demonstrates the availability
of reasonable quality ‘amateur’ library footage.”
NON-TELEVISION
PLATFORMS
Go
Or No Go – The Challenger Legacy
Producers:
Mirror Mirror Productions; Retro Report
Archives:
Home movie of the 1986 Challenger disaster footage provided courtesy
of Jeffrey D. Ault, Nasa; AP Archive; Bettmann/Corbis; Getty Images
The
Space Shuttle Challenger launched on 28 January 1986 only to break
apart 73 seconds later, killing all seven astronauts on board. Retro
Report and Mirror Mirror Productions revisit the tragedy through
interviews with key participants for the website Go or No Go – The
Challenger Legacy.
“By
interspersing Nasa’s blunt and technical launch footage with a
recently discovered amateur Super 8 film, I tried to recapture the
hope and disbelief I remembered when I watched the launch in my
elementary school classroom,” says producer/editor Bret Sigler.
“The amateur film offered some of the only known footage not shot
by Nasa, and allowed me to include witnesses’ real-time audio
gasps, which were echoed by us all.”
Soul
Boys Of The Western World
Producers:
Wellingmax Films
Archives
Getty Images/BBC Motion Gallery; ITN Source/ NEFA; home movies from
band, family and friends; MTV; Sunset + Vine
This
feature-length biopic of 1980s pop group Spandau Ballet was told
exclusively through rushes, outtakes, backstage, private and unseen
material. (It has also picked up a nomination in Focal’s Music
Production category.)
“Complex
third-party rights, footage in every format and a limited budget were
the chief challenges,” says co-producer Scott Millaney.
Among
the unearthed pieces was a New York concert. “The owner was not
interested in our request and not inclined to search for it,” he
recalls. “It took great diplomacy to engage his participation,
which fortunately resulted in the discovery of a one-hour concert
that had been recorded but never played back.”
The
First World War: Life On The Home Front In North West England
Producers:
Artnoire Creative Services for North West Film
Archive:
at Manchester Metropolitan University Archives North West Film
Archive; BFI National Archive/ Harris Museum, Preston
The
North West Film Archive (NWFA) marked the centenary of WWI by making
its collection of footage of life on the home front available on DVD.
Writer/director
Alison Tarpey- Black’s challenge lay in “accepting that the
archive should drive the content, and in creating a cohesive and
chronological narrative that linked together the disparate material,”
says Marion Hewitt, service manager and public engagement fellow,
NWFA. “The film had to be allowed to tell its own story, which is
not necessarily always the whole story.”
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