Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1021376
F E AT U R E If all the elements are orderly restoration can take from several weeks to two months, more challenging projects can take up to half a year. The Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy film, as happened with many Paramount cartoons, was sold off for television and packaged into 16mm for TV syndication. MacQueen adds that when they made 16mm printing negatives, the new distributor also removed the original Paramount logos and replaced them with their own. "So all the old TV prints have rather clunky replaced title cards," he says, adding that fortunately the alterations were made in the TV negative and not the camera negative. Black and white cartoons weren't so lucky—they would just reshoot a new card, cut off the original, slap on a new card that said U.M. & M. TV Corporation. So when he's restoring black-and-white cartoons there's the added challenge of trying to get back to authentic main and end titles. While classic cartoons tend to be about seven minutes, the Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy was a 17-minute special. MacQueen explains that Paramount and Fleischer Studios occasionally did these two-reelers which, in the cartoon world at that time, were considered epics. For such a project, if the elements are orderly, it can take anywhere from several weeks to maybe a month or two to complete the restoration. The process can take longer because of limited lab space availabilities—there are only two or three working analog film labs left in Hollywood. Soundtracks are separate rolls of negative that have been printed onto the film in a different printing pass from the picture. Nowadays, Macqueen explains, they will try to make a track print from that, if it exists, and then digitally do very careful noise reduction without sacrificing the brilliance and frequency response of the original recording. The original unprocessed track is archived so if there's better technology in the future, they still have an 'x-copy', a one-to-one of the original without any changes. In the case of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, the restoration was straightforward because the negative was in fine shape. It was just a matter of printing it, 32 KEYFRAME