Jack Amos

a tribute by Ron Saunders to archivist and researcher Jack Amos

No man is an island, entire of itself.

Whoever you meet in the course of your life, no matter how fleeting, no matter how briefly, something of them remains within you, becomes part of you. Therefore, it follows that, as John Donne went on to say, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved’.

Jack was a film researcher and, (as he was the first to proudly admit), an archivist for whom the images on the frames of film stored, logged and catalogued within film libraries, was a cache, a reservoir, an illuminating light on, not just our past but our present and our future.

As an archivist, Jack would not be content to let the catalogue do the work of the Library.  Film is a visual medium and, to him, that meant viewing the material, mining deeper into vaults to to see exactly what the vague card reference, ‘LONDON SCENES - 1930’s’ actually concealed. Never fully trusting the description of an item hastily described years ago, he would get immense satisfaction & pleasure from viewing the item &, using his knowledge of newsreels & 20th Century history, unearth the real value of of the moving images sealed within a can of film.

As a researcher, he had the same qualities, digging deeper, determined to get the very best to illustrate the topics, the arguments, the period, the aims of any production he worked on. The idea of pulling a compilation of commonplace shots for use was anathema to him. His aim was always to present his editor, director, producer with the visuals that  would open jaded eyes. Through Jack, many people in our industry came to realise that there was so much more to be discovered, to draw upon, so much more than they had initially thought to look for within the treasury of various collections of moving images.

And so it follows, no matter who we are, if we are concerned with producing programmes that make sense of our past, our present, our future; all of us, and an industry, have been diminished by Jack’s passing. Whether you knew him or not, we are all involved in the loss of a truly exceptional person.

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Feb 16th 2010 11:09 // General // No comments

Getty swallows Jupiter

Stills, footage and music supplier Getty Images has acquired its second biggest competitor after Corbis, photo and footage house Jupiterimages, for US $96 million.

Jupiter Corporation, which includes Jupiterimages, in 2007 reported revenues of $140.3 million, and a bottom-line loss of $77.3 million. Jupiterimages markets rights managed, royalty free and subscription photo services, as well as a royalty free footage collection. Because the content is largely wholly-owned, Getty has been keen to acquire it even though it was only recently itself acquired by an investment group. Getty intends to integrate the two companies' technology, licensing expertise, content, business processes and service, allowing Jupitermedia to pay off all of its bank debt and focus on the further development and growth of its Online Media division.

jupiterimages.com

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Nov 30th 2008 23:11 // News // No comments

BBC MG partners with the Hollywood Reporter

The movie stories content provider has struck a deal with BBC Motion Gallery to syndicate its distinctive content.

BBC Motion Gallery has struck a deal with Lightworks Program Distribution to represent new and archived video content from the Los Angeles-based Nielsen Business Media publication The Hollywood Reporter. Under the terms of the deal, BBC Motion Gallery will license Hollywood Reporter shot video clip content, featuring footagel from movie premieres, award ceremonies and celebrity interviews. The contents of The Hollywood Reporter archive range from footage of celebrities receiving their stars on Hollywood Boulevards Walk of Fame, to the premieres of the latest movies, and to interviews with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. The deal grants BBC Motion Gallery exclusive access to the content outside the US and non-exclusive rights in the US, will also be making newly shot footage available immediately for licensing a few hours after being shot.

bbcmotiongallery.com

hollywoodreporter.com

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Nov 30th 2008 22:36 // News // No comments

European initiative

More than a thousand cultural organisations are making contributions to a European online library, Europeana, a free multimedia venture with content including 80,000 broadcast recordings from the 20th Century.

The motion content for the venture is being supplied by France's Institut National de l'Audiovisuell; it includes early footage shot on the battlefields of France in 1914. Web users will soon be able to access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archive documents, paintings and films sourced from institutions across the EU's member states. At the launchday of the prototype, the portal had to be closed down temporarily because of over demand. Expansion of the project, which was created by the European Commission and is now being run by the European Digital Library Foundation, is planned for 2010. The British Library has contributed audio recordings, images and texts as well as its collection of sound recordings, covering British accents and dialects, British wildlife, and early ethnographic wax cylinder recordings. National libraries all over Europe are offering printed and manuscript material, including digitised copies of rare and valuable books and other contributing museums include the Louvre in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that have supplied digitised paintings and other objects from their collections.

europena.eu

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Nov 30th 2008 22:28 // News // No comments

New moves at ITN

New rep deals have been announced as ITN changes direction.

ITN Source has signed an exclusive representation deal with New Delhi-based media news organisation Asian News International to license its content across all platforms worldwide. ANI provides newsgathering to television channels and multimedia platforms with footage produced in over bureaus in India and South Asia, covering news, entertainment, lifestyle, business, sports and science. The footage also includes Bollywood and the Asian Films library dating back to the late 1930s. ITN Source has digitised 5000 of the most popular clips which can now be downloaded in broadcast quality. ANI programming features on TV stations in the United States, Europe and in Asia.
   This autumn has also seen another change of management at ITN Source with Mark Wood, Chief Executive Officer, stepping down after six years with the news broadcaster. He leaves early in 2009 to "pursue opportunities outside the company" although he will remain in his dual role of ITN chairman for a period. ITN Source now sells video clips from over 800,000 hours of footage. As well as ITN's own news material, it represents the collections of British Path, Reuters, Channel 4 (UK), Granada and, in the USA, FOX News.

itnsource.com

aniin.com

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Nov 30th 2008 22:04 // News // No comments

Getting to grips with the business of research

Steve Bergson reviews a new book that stands out because it tackles a difficult subject in a striking way....not so much a different approach as a new trail being blazed.

Like nostalgia, there’s little doubt film research is no longer what it was. The previously august calling - well OK, specialised job of work, has largely been googlised out of its specialist niche into just another branch of the search after nuggets of information...answers even, that the whole world spends most of its time doing, at least the online part of it. In many ways this is a democratisation of the whole business of looking for film clips that has to be welcomed. As everyone dances to the Boolean tune, effectively removing the sometimes rarified nature of film research, the archive is being given the YouTube upgrade, but there is a real threat to the body of knowledge and experience that also only grew and thrived in the specialist field. It could be uprooted and die in the face of mass data farming.

   This is the vacant lot that Kenn Rabin and Sheila Curran Bernard’s book is seeking to fill - and frankly, not before time because the book is itself out in a field of its own. The dearth of literature about the arcane business of searching catalogues is understandable from a publishing viewpoint but considering how much “found content” makes it onto the world’s collective screen, it is amazing how little attention has been paid it, whether as critiques or guides. Essentially film research has always been what veteran researcher David Thaxton characterised in the early 90s as the role of the forward scout for production work....and that means engaging with the creative process by finding appropriate content and rejecting the wrong stuff. Without that aspect of the role, all the clip-finding skills, detective nous and negotiating acumen are in vain. Research is one of the key components of the business of story-telling.
  Gratifying for the professional research community is the way this book refuses to pull its punches on this issue. While delving into the available collections and means of carrying out research, running throughout is the sense that you need a scout to find your way through these particular woods, in whichever neck of them you find yourself. But the authors also make it very plain that this scout is no backwoodsman merely trying to protect their previously impenetrable domain:

....skilled researchers also have the instincts of good filmmakers; in fact, many are filmmakers. They know how to select enough material to meet your editing needs, allowing you to use it to tell a compelling film story—if you
give them the leeway to do so. In other words, don’t think of them as “order fillers,” following a narrow wish list of dates and events. Instead, work with them as a key part of the creative team.

Interviews with experienced hands - across the world - from Alexander Kandaurov in Moscow to Lisa Savage in Sydney emphasize the point that the field is now very wide, though the markers and guides to making good use of their knowledge remain much the same as they always did.
   The title of the book is pointing out this angle as well as making a play to pitch the sometimes specialised subject a great deal more box office. The emphasis is on how to make use of content, working around the numerous obstacles barring the way to clearance that the copyright laws across the world put in the way of the natural flow of creative effort towards the mashup. The authors have ambitiously set out to create a manual which is liberally scattered with examples and discussions by practitioners, to break up and illuminate the instructional passages. People like the award-winning Elizabeth Klinck and industry doyen Rick Prelinger deliver reliable opinions and insights - and the spread of reference tries hard to reach out to international sources for information, despite the tricky legal differences that this inevitably highlights.
   One problem - reflecting the dominance of US media - is the gulf in conceptual thinking between the US and the rest of the globe over the notion of Public Domain. Nowhere else interprets the term to include the copyright implications the way the USA does. ‘PD’ is an acronym and term that engenders confusion because linguistically it’s a false friend; it means different things to different lawyers. A very knowledgeable British one, Hubert Best explains the background very lucidly, but discussion often ignores the sense that the difference is as much philosophical as practical. The need for a unified outlook on the whole business is clear. The rest of the world continues to be envious of the idea that US tax dollars create certain content, produced in the name of its government, therefore, as long as it is not marked “classified” for matters of national security, it should be free to re-use. Frankly, this is a world away from the outdated approach prevalent elsewhere where authorities hide behind concepts like the UK’s “crown copyright”...in reality a sneaky though probably essential way of gathering payment for the service of making the content available. The corollary of this is the bizarre situation in the US government paying for the vaulting of a private entity’s materials (such as vintage prints from Hollywood studios) without the tax-paying public having access.
   This book also doesn’t duck the other most tricky adversary to a healthy mashup culture...”the economy stupid”. The pricing of the footage is of course a key issue. There is a widening distance between the budgets of most filmmaking projects and the realistic sums needed to maintain the archives. US Public Domain is afterall the luxury of a fully funded national archive policy, even though it may not always seem that way at College Park, Maryland where the US National Archive is located. It is in this gap that too big a proportion of the re-use of content falls. It is also into this trough that YouTube has poured its varied and often non-licensed offerings. The book’s discussions do not flinch from examining this worrying divide as well as offering cautionary tales from realworld examples of mis-use and legal wrangles. But never does the examination of the sometimes abstract elements lose sight of the practical experience of making movies, telling stories. The authors are always on the side of the application of good sense to the minefield of rights clearances - the primary but also secondary and even tertiary rights that riddle the whole domain.
   Rabin and Curran Bernard also concur whole-heartedly with the nostrum: the presence or absence of visuals should not dictate which stories are told. They are persistent optimists when it comes to filmmaking adaptability and artistic dexterity. There are some good stories from high profile examples like ‘The Good German’ and ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ which supply us with just the right amount of technical detail. Geoffrey C Ward’s contribution is especially valuable about working with the grain of available archive footage. The round table discussions involving proponents like Rick Prelinger and Jon Else also break up areas that could be regarded as didactic - providing a valuable service in educating the new filmmaker but “taking coals to Newcastle” for the experienced hacks already working the field. Bill Nicholls stresses that documentary makers often want it both ways - the truth in the journalistic sense - but also the freedom of the filmmaker. In the art versus reportage argument, Prelinger might have the best approach: “I think we need to make sure that we’re open to new ways in which footage is used, and celebrate these new ways.”
   There is a familiar plea for sufficient time for research that can mean the difference
between using material already deployed many times or finding something truly surprising, even groundbreaking. In the 1980s, David Thaxton was at the National Archives, looking for footage on the topic of the 1964 incident in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin. The Navy of North Vietnam it was alleged had fired on two US ships near the Gulf while they were in international waters; the administration of US President Lyndon Johnson cited these attacks to obtain Congressional approval for expanding the war. It was later revealed that the first attack may have been provoked by one of the US ships and that the second incident never happened. The subject index to the Navy collection had been discarded, so Thaxton began to go through all of the cards chronologically. “I came across this group of eleven or twelve reels, and it was written on the card, ‘shot day for night,’ ” he says, meaning that they were filmed in the daylight, but filtered to appear as night. “I asked the Archives to make viewing prints of them. And when I looked at them, I thought, ‘My gosh, they have gone back and restaged the entire Tonkin Gulf incident to provide a record of which ship was where and when they started firing.’ Was it the truth? No, of course not. It was shot days later.” The time it took Thaxton to go through the catalogue, order
   The overall impression this book leaves is of the film researcher as an endangered species. It is pitched at the working producer who knows there is a need for the skilled researcher, realising the role is more than the sum of all its component parts - involving so many aspects of the rights questions and technical challenges. The researcher does need to have the instincts of a good filmmaker; many are filmmakers. Given how difficult the whole process of safely using "found" material can often turn out to be, It is amazing so much good work finds its way onscreen. In giving us the most comprehensive book yet to emerge on the demands of the whole tricky business, not only have Rabin and Curran Bernard re-examined all kinds of issues that are can never be taken for granted by the people left working in the field, but that have managed at the same time to re-invigorate their profile for everyone else involved in filmmaking.

Archival Storytelling   by Kenn Rabin and Sheila Curran Bernard

# Paperback: 336 pages
# Publisher: Focal Press (31 Oct 2008)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 0240809734
# ISBN-13: 978-0240809731

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Nov 30th 2008 20:55 // General // No comments

Telling Stories with Archive

With the publication of 'The ethical use of archival visuals: memories of 'Vietnam: A Television History', industry stalwart Kenn Rabin has co-written a book on the often little understood art - technically and morally - of using archive footage in media programming. Here he looks at some of the crucial issues.

I first paid serious attention to the use of archival visuals to tell history on television (apart from its casual use as “stock shots”) when I saw the Thames Television World War II series, The World at War, broadcast in the U.K. beginning in 1973 and in the U.S. in 1974. In fact, the series had at least one notable predecessor: The Great War (about World War I), had been made in 1964, but, according to Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the producers in some cases let “generic” or incorrect footage stand in for specific battles and events. This had also been the case with what was the most high-profile U.S. historical documentary series to date, Victory at Sea, broadcast by NBC in 1952-1953.
In 1980, separate proposals by PBS producer L. Richard Ellison and noted journalist Stanley Karnow were combined into one project by WGBH, the public television station in Boston. Vietnam: A Television History was born. I had been working with Bill Moyers in New York, but moved to Boston to become the Archivist for the series. Ultimately, Vietnam became a coproduction of WGBH, the U.K.’s Channel 4, and Pathé Cinema/Antenne 2 in Paris. The Paris producer was responsible for the first two episodes (the “backstory” about the French in Vietnam); the rest of the series, covering the American involvement, was produced by American and British teams working in tandem in Boston.
  Several of the key production people from World at War, including Jerome Kuehl, Martin Smith, and the extraordinary researcher, Raye Farr, came to Boston to participate in the production. Martin and Raye became my “gurus” since they had been through the process before (both later would be associated with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC). Also joining our staff was Lawrence W. Lichty, a professor at Northwestern University, and an expert in the American news coverage of Vietnam. He came to Boston carting forty filing cabinets full of tapes, written notes, and computerized logs.
   In the fall of 1980, before production began, came “school.” Internationally respected journalists, historians, filmmakers—anyone and everyone thought to be of use to the project came and conducted seminars. Many disagreed with each other or provided prismatic, alternate views of events. It was a wonderful type of boot camp, and I don’t know of any other documentary or series that has done this, beyond Eyes on the Prize. Certainly this process is lost to the quickie formulaic cable documentaries, and lost, probably, to tighter budgets even on more carefully crafted documentaries.
Because the Vietnam war was still so close (Saigon fell in 1975 and we began production in late 1980), emotions ran high in our production office at various moments. It was a positive thing that we all had strongly-held and often disparate opinions. When we began production, Richard Ellison provided a staff-wide memo essentially saying, “Never assume. Never simply trust that there is one right answer. Going into the process, trust your own opinions least.”
   Vietnam probably used the “purest” historical documentary vocabulary ever. Every statement made by the narrator, even every statement made by participants, either in archival footage or in interviews we conducted, was checked and rechecked for accuracy; a “bible” was created to keep track of every statistic and historical point made in each of the (originally) 13 episodes. In addition, there were some vocabulary rules: No music could be added to anything in the show (except for opening and closing titles) unless it was live sound from the archival source (band music at a parade, or sound from a soldier’s transistor radio, for example). There was no underscore. Any sound effects added to silent footage had to be vetted by the Imperial War Museum (and in most cases provided by them); therefore the IWM located specific sound effects based on videotapes of fine cuts. They provided only the sound effects that matched a particular weapon, such as an AK-40, or, say, a “Huey” helicopter, and only if it was seen on-screen. No footage could be manipulated as to speed, in order to avoid eliciting any emotional effect not originally intended. Freeze-frames were allowed (in an emotionally neutral way), but they were used sparingly (and often for the last frame of the episode, over which the closing titles would appear).
   This might seem, to some, as if Vietnam’s producers and staff established the Dogme95 of documentaries. However, even as the series was being broadcast in the United States, the organization Accuracy in Media (AIM) created an hour-long rebuttal, narrated by Charlton Heston, and including archival that had been manipulated, both in speed and with accompanying ominous music. AIM’s “documentary” argued that our series was biased and our conclusions wrong-headed (actually, we’d made no conclusions, at least not that I was aware of). AIM strong-armed PBS into broadcasting their show after our series had finished its run, and the AIM show was followed by a studio discussion program.
   Such was the level of emotion about the subject, still, in 1983 (when our series hit air). As you might imagine, in this instance, our “bible” came in handy, and we could refute each argument AIM made with confirmed facts and figures.
   Unfortunately, Vietnam as it was originally broadcast over 13 weeks in 1983-1984 has been replaced by a re-edited and remixed version done for the PBS series American Experience. This version first aired in 1997, and runs 11 hours. American Experience removed the final “Legacy” episode, which was outdated (although an update would have been in order), pared the two French episodes down to one, and made other internal cuts to the show as originally presented.
Was Vietnam too pure a form of documentary filmmaking? Did we sacrifice emotion for even-handedness and historical accuracy? If we are to believe the hundreds of letters we received, many from Vietnam veterans and their families, we did our job well, and the emotional content came through; perhaps “less was more.” Politically, we received exactly as much hate mail from one “side” as we did from the other, but very much more praise than criticism.
   In Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (produced between 1985 and 1989) the staff of Blackside, Inc. (including me as Series Archivist) used music throughout, since it was essential to the civil rights movement—but always music that the participants would have heard during the time period under discussion. Sound effects were added to silent film most conservatively: If there wasn’t an onscreen clue that a sound might have been heard, it wasn’t allowed. We could not add the sound of a child screaming, if no child was seen screaming onscreen. We could not add the sound of gunshots if no one was firing a gun onscreen.
   Each documentary faces its own set of problems, and the ones that break new ground often create their own rules, establish their own vocabulary. Form follows function. The important thing is that the rules be transparent to the audience. If you want to add music, fine, but do it in a responsible way that doesn’t alter the integrity of the original artifact.
   You might even want to alter the integrity for some deeper meaning. Filmmakers have created whole new genres by doing this. But the audience must understand you are doing it. Establish your vocabulary, communicate it elegantly to the audience in the earliest moments of your film, and then they will know where in the highly subjective worlds of documentary, drama, and “art film” they are situated. Historically, one needs only look at the GPO films produced under John Grierson (Coal Face, Night Mail); more recently, the films of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War), “found footage” filmmakers Craig Baldwin (Spectres of the Spectrum) and Jay Rosenblatt (Human Remains), as well as numerous art installation pieces that use audiovisual archival materials in postmodern or transformative ways to see how archival use can be less than “pure” (in the Vietnam sense), but still ethical and effective.
   No film can be purely objective; it is not within nature of film to be so. Unless a film consists of pure rushes, events are arranged, compressed for time, and manipulated by the editor. Even in this circumstance, someone has chosen what to frame in and what to frame out. Usually, music is added and color, brightness, and contrast are timed in postproduction. Vietnam simply represents one end of a spectrum. On the other end is irresponsible documentary filmmaking (take your pick of examples). But for the creative producer, there are numerous colors in between.

Kenn Rabin is coauthor, with Sheila Curran Bernard, of 'Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music' published by Focal Press/Elsevier. The book includes a chapter-length roundtable discussion with filmmakers, archivists, administrators, and academics concerning the ethics involved in using archival materials.

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Nov 2nd 2008 22:02 // General // No comments

Russian archives nationalised!

Feature films from studios to be pooled in national archive

The Russian government has announced that it is to take over the film libraries of the nation's major film studios to form a centralised collection of 7,200 features, documentaries and animated films.

The new collection will comprise titles largely from St. Petersburg-based Lenfilm, the animation studio Soyuzmultfilm and Moscow's Gorky Studio but not Mosfilm. The plan is for the government to manage rights for the collection itself, in the expectation of making $5 million-$6 million a year. Currently, the rights to the studios' collections are rented out to private companies.

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Oct 31st 2008 23:13 // General // No comments

iStockphoto survey reveals a lack of copyright understanding

A recent study of more than 1,000 people conducted by KRC Research and microstock imaging producer iStockphoto has revealed that 33 percent of Americans are using downloaded digital content. However, nearly 30 percent are unaware that permission may be required for its use.

The survey shows that while many Americans are using downloaded digital media content for personal or professional use, only 41 percent appear to be aware that there are companies that sell royalty-free images, videos, music or sound effects. Although more than 40 percent of Americans consider photography, videography or music a hobby, only six percent are profiting from their digital media avocations.

The problem seems to be that because it has become so user-friendly to upload images and video to the net, almost half the population feels comfortable using online digital content, according to Bruce Livingstone, CEO of iStockphoto. “We’re happy to provide these same eager digital content providers with a place to learn about and profit from their artwork” he says, “we see a vast, media-hungry customer base out there who may not know what stock means but we continue to lead the pack of stock image companies to satisfy this growing appetite for legally-sound digital content."

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Sep 30th 2008 22:51 // General // No comments

Demotix aims to mainstream citizen journalism

A new agency is aiming to rep citizen journalists and user generated content suppliers

This new agency is aiming to use the resources of citizen journalists to sell to mainstream media outlets. Demotix will sell news videos and images submitted by professional and amateur correspondents worldwide to mainstream media outlets. The fee split is 70% to the content creator, and 30% to the agency. Turi Munthe, Demotix CEO, says, "Demotix is potentially crucial to the mainstream media, but we don't pretend to be the mainstream media. It's a public site and we hope that it will become an alternative place for people to get their news. But we want to have a little bit more kick than that - we want to turn our 'street reporters' into sources for the mainstream media." Images of North Korea have already been seen on the site since its rollout six weeks ago.

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Sep 30th 2008 22:47 // General // No comments