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T he stock footage market is very competitive, with many companies of- fering vast archives that date back to the early days of film. Others spe- cialize in contemporary footage, and some even shoot new material based on what they perceive as a demand. Anticipating customers’ needs is only half the battle. Making footage easy to browse online is a necessity, and when more help is needed, representatives have to be extremely familiar with their collections, finding gems that clients may not know exist. This month Post spoke with a handful of stock users, researchers and footage houses about their latest work and the challenges they had to overcome to find the perfect shot. THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP Richard Loncraine recently directed The Special Relationship, an HBO feature that looks at former English Prime Minister Tony Blair’s relationship with the United States during the Clinton administration.The feature was co-produced by the BBC and HBO last summer and spent three months undergoing post pro- duction in London. Michael Sheen plays Tony Blair and Dennis Quaid takes on the role of Bill Clinton.While the film reenacts different historic events from the period, stock footage was also used to underscore the historic perspective. “What we did was process it, so we put the interlaced lines onto the footage in a slightly false way,” Loncraine explains.“We didn’t try to copy exactly the way interlaced lines look.We used the device so that the audience would know that it was archival material.There are a few shots of Blair — him being elected, when he’s arriving at Downing Street — that we processed to make it fit in with the other the material. I think there’s one shot of Blair in Kosovo that we did the same thing with.We were making sure the audience knew it was real footage. Also, because it would have never matched with our first-generation 35mm nega- tive, which is obviously immaculate. It worked pretty well.” The Super 35mm film was scanned at 3K by Ascent Media in the UK. Melanie Oliver edited the project over a three-month period, working on an Avid system that was set up in rented space in London. Director Richard Loncraine estimates that just under 20 minutes of The Special Relationshipis made up of stock footage from a variety of different sources. The use of stock inThe Special Relationship, the third part of the Peter Morgan trilogy (The Deal,The Queen), presented numerous challenges, notes Loncraine. For one, the production was not allowed to use more that 20 minutes of stock footage in order to adhere to the London tax incentives for production. Lon- craine estimates the stock total somewhere at 18-plus minutes. Loncraine says nearly every major stock house was tapped while researching footage for the production, including co-producer the BBC.“[We looked] every- where literally — probably every major house in the world.All the news compa- nies and the BBC.The BBC was a co-producer, so we had access to their library, though they are quite tough about.” Clearance was another issue, as is was often impossible to find the sub- jects that appeared in the original news footage. A further challenge was finding material that met the quality demands of the project. “It’s a television feature here and in England,” says Loncraine,“but every- where else in the world it’s in the cinema.The archive material at that time was always shot on analog cameras — not very good analog cameras — and we couldn’t get to the original tapes. It had already been archived into other forms. It was a very time-consuming and complex job.We’d get mate- rial that we liked, but it was unusable when projected on a cinema screen.” Original footage for the feature was shot on Fuji Super 35mm film, so bad video footage would surely stick out against the well-shot film ele- ments.The production relied on London’s Bluff Hampton Company to process the archival material, helping it to better fit into the production. THE IMPORTANCE OF RESEARCH Rosemary Rotondi is a freelance researcher (www.archivalfilmre- search.com) with nearly 25 years of experience in finding footage for clients, most of whom produce independent doc- umentaries. She’s developed countless relationships at stock houses over the years, and this is something that often serves as a benefit to her cash-strapped clients. “Some archives have a preferred vendor relationship, where my clients will get a reduction in licensing costs,” she explains. Over the years, Rotondi has gotten to know the various archives well, along with the people running them.“That really expedites a lot of the research,” she notes. “I will always start with the archive that I have a solid relationship with — one that is really open to negotiation with my clients on their final order. I’m al- ways sensitive to the independent filmmaker’s budget needs and budget con- straints.Very few documentarians have a large budget for their archival research now, so you really always have to be sensitive to that.” Her research regularly puts her in touch with numerous archives.Among her fa- vorite are France’s Gaumont Path Archives, Rue Des Archives and Lobster Films; New Animal Productions (www.newan- imalproductions.com) in NYC worked with Thought Equity Motion to acquire footage for the two-part doc JFK:3 Shots That Changed America.The project uses rarely seen or heard footage to document the Kennedy assassination and the nearly 50 years of speculation that have followed. EP Nicole Rittenmeyer and producer Elizabeth Tyson note the archive mate- rial came from a range of sources, including eyewitness home movies, police radio dispatches and raw news footage. Part 1 focuses on the assassi- nation of the president and the days that followed, while Part 2 examines the aftermath. ™ P Now exclusively representing Soul Train for clip licensing www.postmagazine.com HISTORIC / CONTEMPORARY VIDEO / FILM / HI DEF July 2010 • Post 41