Broadcast
The role of the footage library is constantly evolving, aided by the onward march of on-demand online viewing.
This year’s Focal International Awards aim to reflect archives’ creative contributions with an award for Footage Library of the Year.
“Footage libraries are responding to industry changes with new ways of working and fresh sales and marketing initiatives,” says Focal events and exhibitions chair Jane Fish.
“This year, we’ve seen some libraries introduce development workshops and others take a proactive stance towards preservation, while more are getting involved in production as a creative co-producer or financial partner.”
All of which makes Broadcast a solid fit as sponsor for the awards’ Footage Library of the Year category, which will recognise an archive that has introduced a new service, initiative or innovation in the past year.
In the running are British Pathé, Reelin’ In The Years and ITN Source, which is in the process of closing. This “illustrates the strength of feeling in the community about the loss of a good source”, says Fish.
British Pathé
2016 proved to be a standout year for British Pathé. The library increased brand awareness, expanded its licensing business and launched initiatives such as on-demand channel British Pathé TV.
“We feel that the age of linear TV is coming to an end. People want to watch programmes on-demand and for the first time, the bandwidth and technology is able to deliver it,” says general manager Alastair White.
The subscription channel launched in October and also has carriage on Amazon Prime in the US. Take-up is encouraging, says White, with new subscribers every day.
Content is bolstered with acquisitions and co-productions such as feature-length documentary Revolution In Colour, for which black-and-white material from 1910-1923 was colourised. This co-pro with Zampano Productions aired on Ireland’s TV3.
“Content doesn’t have to be historical or archive-based,” says White. “We are interested in any idea that would be of interest to our audience.” These viewers range from history buffs and royal watchers to cinema aficionados and train enthusiasts.
“We’ve had a lot of success with train programming, such as cab rides that film the view of a journey between London and Bristol,” adds White.
The channel attracts 360,000 daily visits globally (10 million a month) across various social platforms, including YouTube.
“This helps us grow our licensing business internationally where the brand is less well known and helps as a launch pad for British Pathé TV,” says White.
The archive also embarked on a collaboration with the Irish Film Institute to restore and preserve 133 films of Ireland’s filmed heritage in HD.
In March, it took control of North American sales to work directly with producers. One result was the provision of HD content for PBS series American Experience: The Great War.
“By clearing rights for worldwide media, Netflix and Amazon have raised the budget and the bar for factual programming,” says White. “In terms of quality, other broadcasters have had to follow suit. That’s good for business.”
British Pathé’s core business remains licensing, with footage appearing in Netflix series The Crown and director Ron Howard’s theatrical release The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years.
“In short, we see ourselves as a media company with archive, programming and a channel,” says White.
Reelin In The Years Productions
San Diego-based Reelin’ in the Years Productions has made it its business to find, transfer and catalogue unique, historically significant archives. In the past year, it has begun that process with three shows: The David Frost Show, Brian Linehan’s City Lights and Dutch music show Countdown.
“We are a small company that deeply cares about this material and saving it before it is lost to time,” says company president David Peck.
The David Frost Show aired daily from 1969 to 1972 in the US. Peck describes its mix of entertainment, comedy, music and politics as “an amazing time capsule of the 20th century”.
The archive includes nearly 400 two-inch quad tapes and many film elements, most of which have sat untouched in an underground storage facility since their initial broadcast.
“It costs hundreds of dollars to transfer just one of these tapes and we’ve already done more than 250 episodes,” says Peck. “It can be a miracle to get these tapes to play at all; in some cases, it can take 10 hours to transfer one 90-minute show.”
Canadian TV host Brian Linehan produced and fronted City Lights from 1973 to 2000. While many interviewers focus on the cult of celebrity, Linehan was strictly interested in what goes into making a great film. “The archive is a virtual history of 60 years of film,” Peck says.
“To locate, transfer and preserve it has been monumental. It had been sitting in three different companies and at one point, one of them was going to throw out more than 1,000 master tapes because they didn’t own them. Thankfully, we stopped that happening.”
Dutch music show Countdown recorded more than 3,000 hours of musical performances, interviews and concert appearances between 1977 and 1993. Reelin’ in the Years has begun the task of transferring and cataloguing nearly 3000 PAL 1 Inch B and PAL Betacam master tapes.
It also discovered many other tapes in Dutch archives, including a number of shows with multi-tracks of live recording.
ITN Source
Sadly for ITN Source staff, not even an award will prevent ITN from winding up its archive business. Chief executive John Hardie decided last year to close it down as part of a plan to grow ITN’s revenues to £180m by 2020 by concentrating on production.
“The archive sales and distribution business didn’t fit with this strategic plan,” says managing director of digital content services Andy Williams. “We felt that other parties whose core business is distribution, and which have a global scale, would be better suited to growing our sales.”
ITN will continue to own, manage and catalogue material but from 1 August, Getty Images will handle sales of more than half a million clips.
“The handover process has been very smooth because the ITN archive is in such a good state,” says Williams. “It’s entirely digitised and comprehensively catalogued.”
The other main archives currently managed by ITN Source – Fox News and Reuters – are being taken in-house. ITV Studios, also part of the ITN stable, is considering options for its archive, according to Williams.
Its pending demise undoubtedly played a part in the nomination. “A real treasure trove of archive gems is sadly soon to be disbanded,” laments freelance archive producer Peter Scott.
The library’s knowledgeable researchers receive most plaudits.
“They are constantly engaging with us to find new ways of getting the best out of the footage, and importantly, work with us to find a way of using their content, in terms of budget and rights,” says Title Role Productions managing director Helen Tonge.
This year, ITN Source introduced workshops as a way to get its archive in front of producers and brainstorm programme ideas.
“Having the opportunity to see their footage in good quality, and not just online, is a brilliant way to inspire creativity and boost idea generation,” says Gillane Seabourne, chief executive and creative director of Midnight Oil Pictures. “These increase producers’ opportunities for pitching programmes to channels.”
Commissioned ideas that came from this route include Znak & Co 19-part Sky Arts music doc Trailblazers.
“To make archive-heavy shows more affordable, we can also arrange non-traditional commercial models, such as coming on board as a co-production partner and taking a share of backend programme sales,” Williams adds.
Examples include Royal Secrets (TVT Productions for ITV) and Top Tens Of Warfare (ITN Productions for CBS Reality).
ITN Source material on Princess Diana is currently being mined by a number of productions ahead of the twentieth anniversary of her death in August.
Other programmes that have made extensive use of the archive in the past 12 months include Netflix’s 8 x 60-minute Captive and Channel 5’s Inside Windsor Castle.
Serge Viallet : Lifetime Achievement
French documentary film-maker and archivist Serge Viallet is this year’s recipient of Focal’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Viallet’s early career was spent making films for charity Medicine Sans Frontiers to help prepare medical crew for the situations they could face in war and disaster zones.
His first documentary, made in 1992, was nominated for an Emmy. Kwai, about the prisoners of war who built the famous bridge, led to further documentary features including Saipan (also Emmy-nominated),Nagasaki and The Rape Of Nanking, which won Best Use of Archive Film in a Factual Production at the Focal International Awards 2008.
“The more I used filmed archive, the more I understood the importance of looking carefully at the image, not just to illustrate an event but as a source of information,” he says.
For the past decade, Viallet has been producer in residence at Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, where he has worked on the long-running Mysteries Of The Archives series, which seeks to re-evaluate 20th century events by interrogating the filmed record.
Still in production, Mysteries won a Focal Award for Best Use of Archive Film in 2009, and International Federation of Television Archives (IFTA) awards for Best Use of Archive Film in 2009 and Best Archive Preservation Project in 2010.
Subjects have included the Khmer Rouge, Buffalo Bill footage recorded in 1910 and the liberation of Paris in 1944.
He says his experience as a cameraman helped him challenge the veracity of previously accepted filmed documents of historic events, such as the surrender of Japan to the Allies on board USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.
“We examined footage from all 42 cameras at the event,” he explains. “We noticed that there was a problem with one of the signatures and a correction was made to one of the documents. If the Japanese had not agreed to this, the war may well have continued.”
This came to light when Viallet put the footage in order and noticed a difference in the behaviour of those present.
He was also able to determine that footage held in the US Library of Congress showing citizens in New York celebrating armistice on 11 November 1918 was in fact shot several days before.
“Because of a huge mistake made by an American journalist in France and relayed by a New York press agency and then the morning newspapers, thousands of Americans were on the street to celebrate a German capitulation that was not yet even at the stage of negotiation.”
Meticulous detective work included finding an original copy of the newspaper whose headline is depicted in the footage and using Google Street View to establish where the footage was shot.
“We always check meteorology to match footage with the day it was filmed and in this case while the footage shows a sunny day, the weather report on armistice day was for rain,” Viallet says.
With no audio available, he managed to get lip-reading experts to explain what people in the street were saying.
“What we know about the world from the past 120 years has mainly come from these images,” he says. “They create our collective memories. It is vital that we preserve and verify their accuracy.”
Viallet says that current concerns around ‘fake news’ can be combated with the same techniques he advocates for testing propaganda.
“The problem is with our perception of images today. We tend to glance at them on a cell phone and pick up on the emotion, but we don’t pay attention to the image.
“Only when you truly study the image does it become valuable as a historic record for all of society. That holds true for something shot 120 years ago or tomorrow.
