Film preservationists take note!
This is what can happen to *your collection* if the proper precautionary steps are not performed! Consider yourself forewarned – duhduhduh!!
“What survived, survived piecemeal,” according to Sky Hepburn, who calls herself a ‘film preservationist’ even though, strictly speaking, there is no ‘film’ left to preserve. “We work with a variety of binary source materials which are themselves re-encodings of long-obsolete single-perspective external media. Sometimes we have just one channel of information to work with, so we can only approximate the original experience.”
“Approximating the experience” is challenging, to say the least. We asked Hepburn to comment on her most difficult restoration work.
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There have been successful restorations, however. All of the materials survived for Memento (2000), but the film was, according to Hepburn, “…a hopeless mess. After years of fruitless analysis, somebody, I forget who, suggested we reverse the order of the sequences.” This provided a ‘Rosetta Stone,’ although Hepburn admits that the now fully restored film is “…kind of boring.”
Read the full News From the Future article here!
