- Hit it.
(upbeat music)
- You're gonna need a bigger boat.
(projector rattling)
- We started preservation and restoration
on the film analog level back in the early '90s,
and we've been working on it ever since.
And we have done either restoration or preservation
of over 1,200 feature-length titles.
(bright music)
- There's a select group of titles that we're working on now
that was selected by executives, film historians,
that we can put away and preserve for generations to come.
When restoring films today,
you want to maintain the creative artists' look.
Producer, the director, the cinematographer
collaborated for a look in a movie.
You don't want to lose that in restoration.
- We're not altering the filmmakers' vision,
but we are removing things
that are detrimental to the experience
that may be distracting.
Now we have tools to be able to deal with that.
- We're in scanning right now,
and this is where it all starts.
We have original camera negative loaded on the scanner.
The scanner basically converts
each and every film frame into a digital image
at three times the actual resolution in the film.
- Now that we're scanning off of the original negative
at very, very high resolution
and creating very high-resolution digital images,
it does things like make grain more apparent.
Film grain is one of the things
that make film look like it does.
And we certainly don't want grain to be nonexistent
and make everything look flat,
but where it causes an objectionable
or distracting aspect of enjoying the film,
we do want to manage it.
- That I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted.
But to remember, it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.
- Like, for example, "To Kill a Mockingbird,"
they did a lot of optical push-ins.
The camera is not moving in on a character.
- I got somethin' to say.
- It's done optically in a lab,
so that grain, instead of maintaining the same size,
it gets bigger because it's being blown up.
And so what we do is we average the grain
so it matches the scene before and after the push-in.
So the grain is not huge on the push-in,
it's the same as the shot before and the shot after.
- Also, a original film element, like an original negative,
can be subject to flicker.
- Flicker sometimes is a fluctuation
where the density gets darker, then brighter,
almost like lights being turned on and off continuously.
- Sometimes it's due to a shutter problem in the camera,
light leaking through on the film edges,
and sometimes it's just because the film's gotten old
and has started to deteriorate.
- There was a serious issue of flicker
in "All Quiet on the Western Front,"
but now there's software that can literally figure out
the average of the light and dark frames
and smooth out that flicker,
and I'm really pleased with the results.
(upbeat music)
- Also, we're smoothing out splice bumps
and things like that where the film jitters.
And when you're constantly watching the film moving
and you can't concentrate on the image,
you want that to be a more stable image.
- What film stabilization does
is it'll lock onto certain key points in the frame
that you want to remain stable,
and it'll track that through motion
and basically hold it still.
There is one scene in "Out of Africa"
where Robert Redford and Meryl Streep
are walking across the frame
and they're bobbing and weaving
back and forth across the frame.
So we have some pretty skilled operators
who took some pinpoints, locked onto them,
and tracked them as the camera was moving,
and did a very did good job of smoothing it out.
- Brad, darling.
I love you.
- I know.
- Color correction is one of the tools that we use
to maintain the intent, the look,
of what the filmmaker wanted to achieve.
- We've had the older titles
where the color has started to fade.
One of our supervisors is working
on an old Rock Hudson title called "Pillow Talk,"
and that has severe fading.
But they were able to isolate the layers that had faded
and bring it back up to its original levels.
(bright music)
- There are times in the preservation process
and in the restoration process
where we run across a section of the original negative
that may have scratches, tears.
- As we were working on "To Kill a Mockingbird,"
we encountered a big tear directly over Gregory Peck.
And there were several really challenging tears in "Jaws."
But today we have some very powerful editing
and restoration systems,
and quite frankly, some very, very skilled artists
that are able to digitally stitch those images
back together and manipulate the images
so that the damage is virtually undetectable.
It's really amazing stuff.
(monster groaning)
(Elizabeth screams)
- It's Elizabeth!
- Audio is a big part of the restoration process.
We're removing things like ticks, crackle,
hum, distortion whenever possible,
and just trying to clean up the track to bring it back
to the way it's really intended to be heard.
- I am Dracula.
- There's definitely a couple of examples
of where we can do some audio restoration
that brings out some of the soundtrack
that wasn't really heard in the past.
- Everything is in order, awaiting your signature.
- Referring to some of our earlier titles,
such as "Dracula,"
where we had a lot of hiss throughout the entire feature.
(static hissing)
(rat squeaks)
(hiss silences) (coffin clatters)
(rat squeaks)
And to listen to a before-and-after track
of something like that,
you can actually hear a lot of things,
whether it be just bumps of the coffin
or the opening and closing of doors
and walking up and down stairs,
little things like that that you couldn't really hear
with all the hiss in the original soundtrack.
(static hissing) (wolf howls)
- Listen to them.
The children of the night.
(both laughing)
(bright music)
- I feel like myself and my colleagues,
we're almost like caretakers.
Back when these pictures were shot,
it was more or less a theatrical presentation,
and after that run was done,
put it away and forget about it.
But now we are actually preserving this for the ages.
- It's alive!
It's alive, it's alive!
It's alive!
- When you come in here
and you look around at the size of the library
and work on these great titles,
doesn't get any better.
- We look at movies as a part of our heritage.
We want to carry that heritage on
to not only our children but our grandchildren.
And by investing in it
and the restoration and the preservation of it,
they're gonna be able to watch 50 to 100 years from now.
(bright music)