Giving the past Authenticity
GIVING THE PAST AUTHENTICITY. USING THE ARCHIVE TO CREATE THE CONTEMPORARY.. AN INDUSTRY TALK AT RAINDANCE 27TH FILM FESTIVAL 2019.
A panel of industry professionals:- Melissa Fish, James Macmillan, Mat Flasque , Sarah Bick and with a host – Justin Shelvin, Actor Director, Writer and Lecturer, discussed the ever burning topic of copyright together with preserving archived materials and keeping them in good enough condition to use and re-use in film TV and other media productions. Justin is also HND Programme Team Leader at the Raindance Film Schol where he lectures on the use of archive materials in film and TV.
Melissa Fish – founder of Paper and Chain, and an Entertainment Lawyer, and running a Media and Industry Affairs Boutique, and Researcher with top names on her budget, provides affordable legal services regarding financing agreements and other things. Anything created by someone gives rise to copyright and all creations have an owner. Peoples’ permission must be given to use copyrighted work giving rise to the “Fair Dealing and Fair Usage” clause. Injunctions can even be served if copyright is infringed – a person has to search for the owners and get permission to avoid this. It can lead to court cases if something has not been thoroughly checked before use.
There is a loose law that 70 years after the person’s demise, usage of their material is free as it is out of copyright, but some writers bequeath works to living persons who then come to own the copyright so before embarking on projects using or referring to other peoples’ work, do checks as the owner may say “No” to using work. Rather than embark on the creative project and then checking it is best to check first to avoid wasted effort!
Just to make things even more complex, regarding work being in the Public Domain, there are different copyright laws for different territories. The British Copyright Council will put you in touch with copyright information. Music copyright – you guessed it – its super complex too! Rule of thumb is “Never copy without the owner’s permission”! This can and does include music and photographs. In the case of pictures and photos, more than one company may offer different rates to use the same photo. Getty Images is regarded as the big company in the marketplace for pics. There are pics owned with non exclusive rights pertaining to them and their use.
Once a film is made, there is a process needed to check for permission to be sought to use footage, such as a TV programme playing in the background, use of music et al. If you can’t afford a professional check do this yourself to cover your back on copyright issues.
On Sarah Bick, who is a Freelance Set Decorator, authenticity is vital to the excellent end product of your material. Action props can elevate the whole story to a new high. Sarah can build them. “Plan your story on what you can get” she says. The most important thing/item of your story is the props to bring richness to the whole work. Sarah spends hours sourcing the original material relating to a period drama or other productions where background scenes and props are important to get the vital realness of the drama conveyed. Costumes and sets are her territory. You can find and source material for a period drama for example using books as the first port of call, then you can also google. Sarah has worked on “An English Scandal” and many other productions and works with the V and A also. The biggest “Shop Window” is You Tube though with over 40,000 subscribers. Part of her work is to be a researcher.
James Macmillan is a Content Delivery Supervisor and Technical Operations Manager based in the Restoration Section at ITV Television Centre in Leeds. They have between 1.2. and 1.5. million digitized assets in Yorkshire available to be shared in future. For an example of work produced they sourced old archives of a bar including fingers tapping in time with a tune, and put it together with footage of Noel Gallagher and made it look as though Noel Gallagher and his band were in a small bar in Manchester using dedicated archived ITV clips kept in Leeds and London. Much of James’s work is restoring and copying old film onto new media material so that it can be rescued from obscurity caused by not only damage but also by updated equipment. Some of James’s work is sourcing all kinds of old equipment used to project films for example so that he can utilize all methods to conserve important old films and music. Essentially James has to rescue old film which if it hasn’t been stored properly needs a lot of work. He works to get ALL content digitized to conserve it.
Mat Flasque is a Director and Co Owner of Footage Farm. He also supplies and monitors archive material. It is an award winning archive library specializing in the public domain. He has also co-produced several documentaries mostly recently an interview with a Dean Man on the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko.
I deeply hope that this information will be of really useful and vital information to filmmakers everywhere so read with care. ENJOY
Penny Nair Price