Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/74632
Stock Finding what you need on time and within budget. By Randi Altman Oftentimes it just makes economical sense to use a stock shot of a city rather than sending a crew. And if your topic is historical, unless you have a time machine, the only option is archival footage. Regardless of the project, there are now more choices than ever to help you find exactly what you need when it comes to footage and imagery. But finding the right shot isn't the only part of the job; knowing licensing and footage rights is exceedingly important… especially in these Internet-loving times. So, if your first instinct is to find the perfect shot on YouTube, put down your mouse and step away from the keyboard. ADAM HYMAN Depending on the project, Adam Hyman of Karga 7 Pictures (www.karga7.com) in Los Angeles wears a different hat. On inde- pendent docs he's a filmmaker, on other projects a co-producer, and on others an archival producer. "I take the work I can get," he says, with a smile. For the past year, Hyman has been working as an archival pro- ducer on The History Channel eight-part series, The Ultimate Guide to the Presidents, scheduled to air in time for the inauguration in January of 2013. While this series focuses on the presidents, it natu- rally incorporates a lot of United States history as well — an enormous task for a documentary archival producer. After receiving the first outline of the series, Hyman put togeth- er a long search list of potential topics, sorte d by episode. He then sent that list to various archives requesting stills and footage. He also started doing his own searches on the sites for the National Archives and Library of Congress — which have public domain imagery — and began downloading material. Hyman did have to hire a researcher in Washington, DC, in order to get materials at the National Archives and the Library of Congress that aren't available online. "A great number of images from the Library of Congress are online, but a great many more 30 Post • July 2012 are not," he explains. "They have references for them but only thumbnails to work with, so I sent somebody to the Library of Congress to order and download high-resolution images." The researcher also went through the "drawers and drawers" of still photos of various presidents that haven't been scanned yet, pulling selections that a photographer then photographed. Hyman's next step was to figure out general licensing rates for each one because there is generally a hierarchy of prices. "You generally start at the low end of the scale and see if you find some- thing you are looking for. If it's a longer list, like with this project, I'll build a list by episode and email it to our reps at each of the archives. Their researchers send a selection to go through, and I'll download the ones I want. Since we are editing a documentary I'll download more images than will ever end up in the show, but I am looking to give my editors as many options as possible. Sometimes I'll know precisely what they are looking for and other times I'll download 20 or more, say, Civil War photos from 1864 to give him lots of choices." Most projects tend to change a bit as the process goes along, so flexibility is important. "As you get into the writing, topics fall out, new things come in and the show gets rethought in different ways, so your needs change a bit," describes Hyman. "Then we get to the script and then the editing, and we have more specific search lists, so I do follow-up request lists to them and do more online search- es to find images for specific holes." Helping fills some of those holes for this Presidents project was HBO Archives, which owns the March of Time newsreels and recently made available its second unit photography from some of its series. Hyman says there are a few shots from John Adams that will be useful as B-roll. He has already ordered some Indian War reenactment shots. "It was an ongoing difficult search to represent Andrew Jackson and the Indian Wars and the Trail of Tears. There are not a lot of good images from that time, but HBO had done Indian War reenactments for Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, www.postmagazine.com Using