Here's the old cinema building again; but this time a CGI model of the façade I've built in Maya.
For reference I used the architectural plans I found in the CTA archive and some photos I took on-site. This is early work really, and the model certainly isn't as accurate or detailed as it could be.
I've not got into any materials or texturing yet either, but next I'd like to try projecting some photographs of the real building onto this model.
I am proud to say that I've Directed/Edited the extra video content on this DVD release, that's 12 episodes (12x3:00) of Simon's drawing tutorials Simon Draws, the 5 minute documentary Simon Talks and a charming 2 minute photo montage Simon's Real Cats. Much of this video content is exclusive to the DVD release and not available on the web, so order your copy now!
I sent this roll to a different transfer facility this time, I wanted to try out the Muller HM73 film-scanner, so sent this film (and a 16GB USB stick) over to 18frames in Bielefeld, Germany.
The service was very fast, they turned this around within a day, it's just the UK/Germany postage that takes time (around 4-5 days each way). They put a 15GB avi file onto my memory stick, a lovely 1440x1080 sized image with the correct 1.333 pixel aspect ratio for my anamorphic footage. So I effectively get back my super 8 reel and a 1920x1080 16x9 file to work with. Kudos to Frank for getting these settings right, because anamorphic super8 footage is a fairly unusual format to be dealing with.
I have to say I am hugely impressed by the quality of the work, especially as this is a reasonably priced service. I'll definitely be sending a few more films this way in the future; maybe even getting a few re-scans of earlier films by way of comparison.
I've been sending my last few films off to Sweden to Uppsala Bildteknik for scanning on the FlashScan HD machine, from that system I was getting a 1024x720 4x3 scan, pillarboxed within a 1280x720 image size.
The new scans from the Muller machine are obviously clearer and higher resolution; the files seem to be hardly compressed too. When ordering the telecine from 18Frames, I opted for their '2k look'; quite a heavily post-processed image which is highly-stabilized and sharpened to look more like larger film formats. For this project, I'm not looking for a wobbly grainy 'home movie' image, I'm trying to make my images look like a glossy cinema travel documentary or a commercial from the 1970s, and these would typically have been shot on 35mm film.
The thing is... the first couple of reels I had scanned for this project now have a very different quality to this new one, leading to the costly possibility of getting a couple of those earlier reels scanned again.
I'm not showing any moving footage from this project just yet, but here are a few stills (from the new Muller-scanned footage) just to give an idea of the new look.
Last week I made a special visit to the Cinema Theatre Association archive in Walthamstow. The CTA is dedicated to preserving and documenting Britain's Cinema architecture.
Back in 2008 I shot this short film whilst on a family trip to California...
Then last year, some fragments of my footage appeared in the official promotional video for Lana Del Rey's breakthrough track Video Games. As it turned out, this song became a huge hit with millions of viewers worldwide.
I am pleased to say that the makers of the video did make contact with me and we came to an amicable agreement for this usage. I can add that Lana and the folks at Polydor have just re-licenced the footage for use in a live concert recently held (Sept 26th 2012) at the London roundhouse as part of the iTunes festival.
Who'd have known that the first test footage I shot with my Nizo S800 cine camera 4 years ago would make the big time?
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| The harbour at West Mersea. |
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| Crab botherers on the quayside. |
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| Local lads diving in the harbour. |
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| Whoops, accidental double exposure! |
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| Reflection in the sail-makers workshop. |
I'm also dabbling in 'analogue' stills photography now. Here's a still from the first roll of 120 film I've got back from the lab (Lomography Diana camera). It's the old cinema building on Essex Road Islington, just round the corner from the TANDEM studio.
Although it's seen better days, this is a huge 1930 cinema designed by George Coles with a very impressive Egyptian-themed tiled façade. The building was a cinema up until the 70s, then became a Mecca Bingo Hall up until 2007. Though the building has been derelict since, it is owned by an evangelical church group who are trying to get planning approval and finances together to do something with it.
Here's a hastily put-together panoramic ' showing the whole of the façade and a bit more of its setting in Essex Road (digital photos from my Canon 600d camera)...
I've become particularly intrigued by the story of this building, and am in the process of finding out all I can about it.
My internet research dallied for a while in the realm of 'Public Domain' footage. Here's a Wikipedia page all about it including a list of films claimed to be in the Public Domain and supposedly not covered by copyright. One can even download most of these films and many others besides at the Internet Archive site.
It seems that the films on these 'Public Domain' lists are mostly ones in which the copyright wasn't renewed by the producers 28 years after the release dates of the films. For a while under US law, it seems that the non-renewal of copyright meant the films would fall into Public Domain use. Even under UK law, as recently as the 1988 Copyright Act, it seems that copyright on films had a 50 year expiry after the release date of the film.
For my project, this seemed ideal; Hollywood films from bygone days that I could cut up and integrate into my project... until I dug a little deeper....
Here's the catch... seems that UK law is quite different from US law on this subject and has changed very much for the worse. Nowadays, UK-based film-makers wont be able to source any film material this way at all, thanks to the 1996 Harmonisation of Copyright amendment to the 1988 Copyright Act. It seems that copyright of old films doesn't just fall away after fifty years of the film's release any more, oh no...
If you want to use old films, you now need to wait 70 years (until the end of the year) the director, producer AND writer of the film have all died! Effectively this legislation prohibits use of any extant old film footage in modern productions for way into the future. Not only that, but our film-making descendants will have a hell of a job working out the copyright status of any given film without finding the death dates of all the writers, directors, producers involved... Frequently, this will require extensive research into a huge list of hard-to track down characters. In short, the time period is too long to be of any creative use, and the multiple death-date system sets up a whole heap of trouble for the future. If a law was ever an ass, here it is.
By 1996 when this amendment to UK law came in, many old films had already out-lived the 50 year copyright period. Any film released prior to 1946 would have been available, plus all of those exceptional cases on the US lists too. The 1996 amendment has retrospectively over-ridden all of this; snatching back what was already out and kicking the rest into the very long grass.
