Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/221535
Colorworks re-masters It Happened One Night CULVER CITY, CA — Frank Capra's 1934 comedy It Happened One Night was recently the subject of a lovingly painstaking 4K restoration by Sony Pictures Entertainment in advance of its release on Sony's newly-launched Video Unlimited 4K download service. The original 35mm negative that served as the basis for the restoration was in poor condition, observes Rita Belda, Sony Pictures Entertainment's executive director of asset management, digital mastering and restoration. In the 1930s, it was common to use original negative to produce film positives for distribution, resulting in damage through overuse. Furthermore, a number of damaged scenes had been replaced by poor quality duplicate elements. Restoration at Colorworks (www.sonypicturesstudios.com), Sony Pictures Entertainment's DI facility, began with a newly-manufactured, wet-gate, fine grain master that had been produced from the original negative, and was scanned at 4K. The new master then went through a lengthy digital film restoration process at Prasad Corporation to address dust, scratches and other artifacts. It was then re-mastered and graded in 4K at Colorworks. Special care was taken to restore the film in a manner faithful to its original look. "The film was photographed by Joseph Walker, who used filters to create a soft, glowing look around the actors, particularly the female stars," Belda explains. "The result is a rich look with a lot of range in the mid-tones. The amount of detail in the negative was startling. It is so beautiful!" Colorworks' senior colorist Scott Ostrowsky used a Baselight system for the grading and remastering. "This film has a soft, shadowy, elegant look, and we wanted to be sure to capture that without stepping on the image," he says. "You don't want to crush the blacks." Successfully restoring films like It Happened One Night is not simply a matter of technology, Belda notes. It is a result of the passionate commitment of the restoration team. "We have a wonderful partnership with Colorworks," she says. "Their colorists understand the value of our library, and the challenges we face." 32 Post • November 2013 Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW). "Most PRC films survive in a terrible state of preservation, usually only in 16mm prints," notes MacQueen. "It's most unusual to find an original camera negative of the era, but the owner of Her Sister's Secret had deposited the negative with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and it was largely in beautiful condition. This was a title with no preservation on it and no prints available to be viewed." A "women's picture" set during World War II, Her Sister's Secret was "groundbreaking" in its treatment of unwed motherhood, he points out."It's very tastefully done, with a fine cast and looks very slick," MacQueen says. "Ulmer tried to make art on a budget." Although the original nitrate camera negative in the archive was in remarkable shape, reel three of nine had decomposed and was unusable, as was 100 feet from the head of reel four. Fortunately, "the owner also had the master positive, the nitrate fine grain to make duplicate negatives from," MacQueen explains. "So we were able to make dupes of the missing portions." In addition, "there was no soundtrack negative, but the fine grain had picture and sound, so we took the soundtrack from it." The soundtrack was re-recorded and digitally restored using Avid Pro Tools and Sonic Solutions systems at Audio Mechanics in Burbank (www.audiomechanics.com). "They denoised the track, brought down optical hiss and took care of any anomalies to make a still-faithful soundtrack," says MacQueen. Simon Daniel Sound (www. simondanielsound.com) transferred the sound from the fine grain and DJ Audio in Studio City (www.djaudiola.com) made the new soundtrack negative. Englewood, CO's CinemaLab (http://cinemalab.com) used the fine grain to fill in the missing sections of the film and made a B-roll duplicate negative of the missing sections to combine with the original camera negative to make an answer print with the new soundtrack. CinemaLab also made a preservation fine grain on polyester stock, a material which MacQueen says is believed to remain archivally inert for 500 years, plus a dupe negative to strike prints from as needed. Picture quality was "relatively good" for a film of the era, since "the original negative didn't get a lot of use; the film probably wasn't reissued after the war and after PRC went out of business," says MacQueen. One of CinemaLab's main concerns was to "ensure that the gamma on the fine grain matched seamlessly when it was intercut with the rest of the footage," he www.postmagazine.com reports. CinemaLab used no digital technology on the project, opting instead for a photochemical process, featuring a Bell & Howell printer. The film's original title sequence — its shooting title was Once and For All — was also preserved, he reports. MacQueen says it was "an honor" to show Ulmer's daughter, Arianne Ulmer Cipes, the restored version of the film. "She has actively encouraged her father's work to be preserved." Her Sister's Secret is expected to be screened at the next UCLA Festival of Preservation in 2015; additional screenings will be at the behest of The Film Foundation. He points out that films such as Ulmer's wartime romance "are typically the kind of pictures the Archive and The Film Foundation address. Films at risk, without the patronage of a large corporation and without the resources to do a preservation at this level are the kinds of films we like to endorse." DEATH VALLEY DAYS TV series are also candidates for restoration. Cinelicious (www.cinelicious.tv), in Hollywood and Santa Monica, is restoring 458 half-hour episodes of Death Valley Days, the syndicated western series, which aired from 1952-1970 and was introduced by a number of iconic western figures, including Ronald Reagan (19641965). The show was sponsored by US Borax Company, and Cinelicious was tasked by its multinational corporate parent, Rio Tinto, with preserving the series' legacy. Steve Wystrach, who manages the US Borax Film Archives and is supervising the restoration at Cinelicious, was hired in 2005 to help locate the elements. Most of the film was stored in sub-standard vaults; prior to that it had been in one of the US Borax Company's old mine sites. Wystrach moved everything to the Hollywood Vaults, just blocks from Cinelicious. At this point, Rio Tinto has no plans to market and distribute the series, so the restoration is "very much about their corporate legacy and the series' important part in television history," Wystrach says. "It's also about American history, since every episode is based on a factual event." During its close to two decades on the air "the show used a lot of different film formats," says Cinelicious managing director and founding partner, Paul Korver. "There was 16mm ECO color, 35mm color negative, and black and white. Some vendors proposed making a new print from the A-B original camera negatives, but we always strive to work from original camera elements because