No Smoke and All Mirrors

How to build a miniature Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) model.

Talking to people about renewable energy, I’ve found that most people haven’t heard of Concentrated Solar Thermal power plants like the Gemasolar one in Spain – so models and photos are really useful in explaining the concept.

Table-top models (like this one) that have been made are proving to be real attractions. But they’re big and heavy. Wonderful for larger venues, but I wondered if something smaller would work too. Something I could carry under my arm.

If you’re here looking for an explanation of how CST works, you might find this link useful. Otherwise,  read on . . . .

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What I bought . . .

I found packs of 20 mirrors, one inch square, for $2.00 in a craft shop. Previously I’d been planning a slightly larger model using clamshell make-up mirrors, but I couldn’t resist the bargain here, and so the ultra-miniature CST model was conceived.

To mount the mirrors at an angle, onto a baseboard, I bought a pack of ¾” paper fasteners, also for $2.00, and a tube of Tarzan’s grip.

The whole thing was going to be not much bigger than a sheet of A4 paper!

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Gluing the fasteners to the mirrors

I bent each paper fastener to about 30 degrees before gluing it to the back of a mirror. Tweezers came in handy to push the brass fastener down to the mirror and make sure it was as square-on as possible.

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The baseboard

The baseboard was just a 30cm square of particle board I had. It needs to be something that will stay flat and not warp in the hot sun.

For my model I decided to have the tower in one corner, about 7cm from the edges.

I had found a fairly long bolt in my box of stuff, with a matching nut. I glued the nut onto the baseboard. That way I’d be able to screw and unscrew the tower to pack the model away for transport.

I drew a series of arcs centred on the tower, at 25mm intervals, and radiuses at 22½ degree intervals. This was going to give me enough room to fiddle with each mirror as I glued it on the board. Each row of mirrors also had to be far enough back from the ones in front to get a clear straight line throw to the tower top.

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Placing the mirrors – first step

I glued the front row in place – 9 mirrors, all at a 75mm radius from the tower. At this stage I hadn’t built the tower, but in any event, I needed a larger screen to focus the reflected light.

I folded a sheet of white card and sellotaped it to the baseboard, with cross-hairs pencilled in about 18cm from the baseboard.

The important thing was to get each mirror aligned correctly in the L-R plane before the glue set.

Vertical adjustment would be easier later, by slightly bending the brass fastener. It helped to get each one right before gluing the next one into place.

( I actually did one row at a time – so this picture was taken at a later stage)

As I got more and more mirrors fixed, it got harder to see which reflects spot was the one I was trying to adjust. Placing a card to mask off the ones already fixed helped, so that only the newest mirrors actually produced a reflection, but then there was a danger of knocking them out of alignment before the glue set.

(I was concentrating on this bit so hard I forgot to take a photo of how to use a card to mask off unwanted mirrors. Here’s the second row in place, but not quite lined up yet.

Fast work needed, before the glue set too much.After the second row of mirrors, I found I needed sunglasses to do the job.

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Let the glue dry

It was important to let the glue dry before trying to adjust the mirrors vertically.

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The tower – “your message here”

Now the tower. I was going to make a long and narrow box from white card (postcard weight): about 20cm high, and each side was 18mm. It would have five sides so that sides one and five would overlap for gluing. The box would fit over the bolt mentioned earlier.

To decorate the box, I drew up a pattern on the computer using a graphics program. Paintshop Pro is my favourite, but you could also do it with Word, making a table with five columns 18mm wide, and putting centred text (about 48-point Arial) into each column, and shading the background.

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Assembling the tower

I discovered that a matching length of garden hose would exactly fit over the head of the bolt, and fit snugly into the card box. That made it easy to assemble the whole thing.

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Aligning the mirrors – stage 2

With just the narrow tower, you can’t see the spots that are out of line – with a wide card you can. So I kept the wider card in place for the time being, to make sure all the mirrors were aligned.

In theory all the mirrors were aligned L-R, so the reflections should have fallen on the vertical centre line. In practice, a few had drifted a little as the glue set. The job was to tease each reflection into alignment – vertically by bending the brass fastener, with a slight horizontal twist if needed. I found the best I could do was to line them up to an area about twice the size of the mirrors (about 25mm square). After getting two lines of mirror settled I made up a third row and glued them in place in the same way.

You need to do this vertical alignment at the time of day you want the model to work best. Once set, the mirrors can’t be adjusted any more, and as the sun changes its elevation, the reflections will move.

I chose 1pm (solar midday in daylight saving). As the sun goes down, the reflections rise higher, and don’t converge so well. You can chase them a little by tilting the baseboard.

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Other structures

I fiddled about with some scraps of things I had around the place, to represent holding tanks, pipes etc. I might add a few more blocks for pumps, turbines etc – though of course they won’t be functional in any way.

Here’s the finished result, in the midday sun.

I might add some more tanks and pipes and other structures if I get around to it.

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The working model

Last thing needed was a box to carry the thing in. I had planned to use a pizza box, but in the end I made one out of a cut-down wine carton which was exactly the right size. I put a little partition near one edge so the tower could be unscrewed and prevented from rolling about and banging the delicately adjusted mirrors.

The project needed a name. Since it’s all about replacing coal-fired power stations with solar ones, I called it  . . .

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NO SMOKE AND ALL MIRRORS.

A Portrait of The Artist as an undone man

Critics and reviewers have spotted umpteen references to silent films, and films about silent cinema and the coming of sound, in Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist.They certainly provide many ways to interpret the film, although it has plenty to say for itself too.

Curiously, the most striking tribute has gone almost unacknowledged – at least in any review that I’ve read. Uggie, the faithful Jack Russell terrier, who does tricks on stage and on the dinner table, and eventually rescues his master George Valentin from certain death, may be descended directly from Asta (from Bringing up Baby) and Lassie, but what shouts out loud (in this not-so-silent film) is the striking reference to Nipper, the dog in the HMV logo (His Master’s Voice, for those who’ve forgotten).

The story, on the surface, is familiar. Silent movie star George Valentin, vain and successful, fails to make the transition to the sound era, and is replaced at the studios by Pepe Miller, who got her first break as a dancer in Valentin’s last film. As she rises, he falls, losing his fortune, his mansion and his wife in the Wall Street crash. All he has left, ironically, is Uggie the dog. Naturally he turns to drink, but Pepe finally finds a way to overcome his apparent obstinacy, and there is a happy ending.

At the beginning, it’s as though George Valentin isn’t just a silent film actor, he is a totally silent man in a silent world. After he is brought in to see a sound test at the studio, he realises the awful truth, in a clever gag scene where he is surrounded by a world of sound. The awful truth is not just that he won’t talk (as he insists, in character, in the spy thriller that opens the film), but that he can’t talk.

So, while his vanity and his obstinacy – and, if the film’s title is to be accounted for, his artistic purity, play a big part in his downfall, that’s not all. The studio boss (John Goodman) sums it up: Valentin is a silent movie star – the public don’t want to hear him talk.”

Here’s the wider proposition:  it’s not about whether you can change, and it’s not about whether you want to change, it’s about whether the public want you to change. Our culture is essentially a conservative one – in fact society generally protects itself by making sure that things change as little as possible. Once you are identified as something, or someone, of a particular type, that’s what you are fated to remain.

It is so interesting that this film should have been made now, in the year that cinema itself is finally dealing with the change that some say is the greatest since the dawn of the talkies – the switch to digital. Perhaps what has happened to Kodak – the once great giant of photography and cinema – is the same as what happened to George Valentin. I suspect some in Kodak – like Valentin – saw the digital business as no more than a passing threat to “real” photographic technology: that is, their entrenched business. They didn’t want to change. But that’s not the important point. What matters is that Kodak’s public saw then as a photochemical company: they no more wanted to go to Kodak for digital cameras than their fictional grandparents wanted to hear George Valentin talk, They wanted to get their digital cameras from a digital company.

There’s a personal angle too. Despite having moved away from film technology nearly ten years ago (shortly after the newer edition of my film technology book came out), and having spent the previous ten mainly concentrating in the film – video – digital interface, I still find many in the industry who almost apologize to me that they are shooting their latest project digitally. Please listen everyone: It’s All Right.  My world has moved on from a developing machine.

Of course I’m not writing off photochemical film any more than I’d write off silent film. Both have great strengths, but the new techniques have strengths too. The question is, whether it is at all possible for someone – a company or an individual – to change what the public expects them to do. And if not, can they, successfully, switch from being the star player to a minor role as cult specialist or character actor.

Digital computing – swallows film up 30 years after first taste? Not quite.

I’ve been attending SMPTE conferences for 30 years this year, and giving papers for just as long. My first one was in Los Angeles where, as a young upstart, I spoke about the computer we had just installed in the film laboratory I worked for. We used it for managing the quality control system in the lab — the chemical analysis and the colour measurements — and we stored the data (and the program itself) on audio cassette tapes (remember those?).

Images and computers had little to do with each other in 1981, although I was lucky enough to visit Walt Disney Studios where they were making the first version of Tron, one of the first films to attempt computer animation. While my computer -– a Tandy TRS-80 — boasted 16 kilobytes of RAM, the supercomputer at Disney had access to 2 Mbytes, which is about what we can expect in a mobile phone within the next year or two. I guess we were seeing the first glimmerings of the digital era.

Thirty years on, computers and digital data have all but swallowed up that photochemical film world. At this year’s SMPTE Australia conference (Darling Harbour, July 18-22) my paper was about the problems of a rapidly disappearing film technology. Over the century or more of film production, archives like NFSA have learnt a lot about how to preserve films for the future. Unfortunately, the film industry is, at long last, going digital, and many cinemas can no longer run film. Film stock manufacture and processing facilities can’t be too far behind, so the future usefulness of the film we preserve so carefully is becoming a little problematical. Perhaps we should digitise it all, but there is, as yet, no certainty about how long we can expect to keep digital data.

It was back in 1956 that Hollywood’s Variety newspaper greeted Ampex’s first video tape recorder with the headline ‘Film is Dead’. In 2011, film isn’t dead yet, but may be moving into a retirement home. Meanwhile, video is all but lost in a cluttered graveyard of formats. At last month’s conference, another presenter showed off his collection of old video equipment, especially obsolete storage media (one-inch reel-to-reel videotape, Betamax tape cassettes, laser disks etc), most of which flourished just for a decade or two before being replaced. As for digital technology, it is certainly burning bright right now: but perhaps we should keep in mind my current favourite tagline:

‘Keep your analogue copies – they may be all that’s left after the digital era is over.’

What do we want?

I went out door-knocking yesterday. My group, Climate Change Balmain-Rozelle, joined with dozens of other groups across the country, talking to people about Renewable Energy. We’ve been doing this for a couple of months now, but yesterday was the culmination of the campaign, and happened to be on the same weekend as the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee was spending the weekend in Canberra, drumming out details of the proposed Carbon Tax.

It’s not like delivering pamphlets, or even collecting for a charity. Door-knocking takes a lot longer to get up and down a street: more often than not there’s no reply at several houses in a row, but then you find someone at home and you’re there for at least five minutes and often ten, going through the questions. But most of us yesterday got to speak to about a dozen people, and I guess that would have added up to several thousand across the country.

All but one of the people I spoke to thought the government should be doing more about renewable energy.  Mostly they said “it’s all talk and no action” or “they’re just playing politics instead of tackling the issues”. Nearly everyone believed we should setting policies that would move Australia towards reliance on renewable energy, not on fossil fuels.

Many people admitted to being a little short on real information about the subject, and complained that the opposition and big business were clouding the issues.

And all but one said we should have a carbon tax, and we should have it now. There was discussion about how it would work, and some concern about its effects and its effectiveness: but as to the general principle, the answer was “yes” there must be a price on pollution, there must be a carbon tax.

You might point out I was in the streets of Balmain, where they’ve just elected a Green MP to the NSW State parliament.  So of course I’d get a  pro-renewable energy response from people. But we’ve been doing this all around the country for months, and all across the country I am learning that the results are similar with only minor variations. People want a carbon tax, and they want to get on with it.

In the climate change movement, we know that the most important thing is to get these voices heard. That’s why we’re doing this door-knocking, to get the opinions of ordinary Australians.

After we’d finished, I got in the car and turned on the radio, scanning the dial for a news station.  As I was backing out of the car park I heard a voice seemingly echoing exactly those ideas.  ” . . .need to hear from ordinary people about this carbon tax . . . “.

I paid closer attention:

” Because let me tell you” the voice went on, ” if these politicians would just  listen to what the people want, they’d hear that we don’t want a bar of this stupid tax.  Nobody wants it.  And let me tell you, we’d hear no more about it – they’d drop it like a stone”.

A shock. After hearing from “the people” all afternoon during a national day of door-knocking, I turn on the radio, and hear exactly the opposite result. I glanced at the radio and found it was tuned to 2UE.   That explained a lot.

Regrettably, political decision-making in this country seems to be based more on who shouts the loudest than on sensible examination of the issues. Politicians take notice of the loudest people, regardless of the actual strength of their support. But yesterday’s door-knock underlined, for me at least, what a small base of support the shock jocks actually have for their views.

And so the task continues, never more important than now: to stand up for action on climate change, for a price on pollution, for support for renewable energy, and against misinformation, fear and the greed of vested interest.

Billions of Bytes

Almost all modern films go through several digital processes. Some are captured using digital cameras, most are edited in a digital format, when visual effects are added and colour corrections are also applied. Increasingly, they are being screened in cinemas on digital projectors, and of course distributed to the home on DVDs or by downloading.

Almost every one of these changes has been met with enthusiasm from some practitioners, and some degree of resistance from others. On the one hand, digital formats are usually a much more convenient technology for many purposes. On the other hand, there are questions about the quality of the image: the resolution, the tonal range and colour depth. Not all digital formats are the same, nor is one format suitable for all purposes: capturing, editing, manipulating, distributing, screening and preserving the image.

The best TV drama is still shot on film and benefits from that high image quality, but in fact there is even more data on the original camera negative than can ever be shown, even on digital HDTV. Video-originated material economically delivers acceptable results on a small screen even though the system is only capable of a limited definition and range of tones and colours.

And it’s here that we find the reason why digital preservation of films continues to be such a difficult issue. The quality of the film image comes at a cost: the cost of massive amounts of data. To match the resolution and colour depth of the image on an original 35mm camera negative, a digital version takes up over 50 Megabytes (Mb) for each frame. With film running at 24fps (frames per second), that’s 1.2 Gigabytes (Gb) for every second. To put it in perspective, an 80Gb iPod could store just over one minute of film at that resolution, and one complete feature film might need over 10 Terabytes (Tb).

It’s true that compression technologies can reduce that data dramatically, so that a complete feature can be put onto a DVD that carries no more than 4.7Gbs. It may be tempting to discard six or seven bulky reels of a film print in favour of a single digital disk, but while a DVD looks great on a TV screen, it doesn’t cut it if you want to fill a cinema screen. Even the Digital Cinema Prints (DCPs) that are distributed to digital cinemas on removable hard drives use a certain amount of data compression. And such compressed images are quite unsuitable for any sort of editing or other image treatment, let alone long term preservation.

For archivists, the overriding rule for preserving any sort of image is that none of the original image detail should be lost. There are ‘lossless’ compression formats such as JPEG2000: but they are pussycats when it comes to reducing data, reducing the file size only to about half if all data is to be preserved. (In comparison, a feature film on DVD is compressed by about 2,000:1).

While many archives are moving to digitise their video collections into an on-line storage system, the sheer amount of data still presents a huge obstacle to any wholesale digitisation of a photochemical film collection. The longevity of digital media is still questioned too, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The cost of storage has been shrinking rapidly for several decades following Gordon Moore’s prophetic law (halving every 18 months), but the demand for it has been escalating almost as quickly. Film archives now count their storage in Petabytes (a million Gbs), but while the cost may be shrinking, the cost of electricity needed to run and cool these massive data banks will far outweigh the cost of the memory itself.

This was first published in NFSA’s blog on 18 March 2011.

Of drought and flooding rain

It would be a mistake to say that the recent dramatic weather events in Queensland and elsewhere are proof of climate change – or even that they have been caused by climate change. The mass of data gathered around the world over many years is proof of climate change: a single event, ore even two or three, is not. What the scientific models predict of climate change is not a simple overall warming, but increased extreme weather patterns of all sorts. As David Karoly of Melbourne University put it recently, Australia has always been a land of drought and flooding rain: climate change means it is becoming a land of more drought and more flooding rain.

Andrew Bolt argues in a blog in The Herald Sun that more rain fell in the 1974 floods in Queensland than in the 2011 floods, and uses this to deny that climate change has anything to do with the current crop of disasters.  After TC Yasi, no doubt he will point to the devastation caused by Cyclone Tracy at the end of 1974 as further “proof” that climate change is not happening. But it’s irrelevant. We know that we get floods and cyclones from time to time and some of them are extreme. On a year-by-year basis there isn’t much pattern, but over decades we can detect trends in the number of events. Greenpeace reported recently that overall there were just as many tropical cyclones around the world in the 1970s as there were in the most recent decade: but the number of category 4 and 5 cyclones has doubled.

The costs and disruption to normal life that these events have caused are also something that Australians should be familiar with. Perhaps we should have an ongoing fund to provide for reconstruction: perhaps we should simply take it in our stride. But the recent devastation in SE Queensland and now in the tropical north is a reminder, and a taste of what will become more frequent, bigger and more expensive disruptions to our comfortable way of life. Those who fret about the cost of any measures taken to combat climate change, or who argue that “warmists” would drive us back to the horse and buggy era – if not back to living in caves – should consider the cost of doing nothing.

This is why Julia Gillard’s recent announcement of massive cuts to carbon abatement programs is exactly the wrong response. In any enterprise, when something goes wrong, we need not only to fix up the problem, but to seek the cause and take steps to prevent it recurring. The Prime Minister speaks of a price on carbon, but there is no sign of it yet: and while some of the carbon abatement programs were less than effective, this widespread slashing sends a strong signal that the Federal Government still doesn’t really plan to show any leadership, locally or globally, in climate change reduction.

Are we losing the picture?

Cinema Paradiso

Three years ago I wrote “ask most cinema-goers how the images they are watching get onto the screen, and they will probably suggest some kind of industrial-grade DVD on a digital projector. They are astonished at the truth, which is that even now, the majority of movies they see are projected from 35mm film – yes, the same technology that’s been in use for over a century. The truth is that digital projectors capable of filling a screen as big as a bus are seriously expensive, and there’s been little reason for cinema owners to abandon their tried and tested film projectors”.

But at last, nearly a decade after the first few digital projectors were installed to screen Star Wars Episode 2, the change to digital is gathering speed very rapidly indeed. Driven by the success of digital 3D movies such as Avatar, cinemas in the USA are installing digital systems as fast as manufacturers can supply them. After a hesitant start, the same is happening in Australia, where the switch to digital also means that independent regional cinemas will at last be able to screen features at the same time as the metropolitan chains. Across Europe, the change is almost complete.

And so here is the dilemma: film archives around the world have developed expertise in preserving film : many expect their collections to last for 400 years or more, stored in carefully-controlled conditions. The old problems of inflammable nitrate film, of shrinking and decomposing acetate film, of fading colour dyes, are all understood and controlled. But how will we screen these prints in the future? And when will that future arrive?

Sooner than we suspect: A correspondent writes: “all screens in Belgium will be digital by the end of the month. No more film prints. They have dismantled the film projectors from the booths. They plan to keep perhaps one per multiplex, just in case, for one year or so.” In Australia, nearly all cinemas will be digital in 3 to 5 years, and few of them will still be able to project film.

attack of the D movies

So why don’t we simply digitize everything? There are so many answers to this question.

For a start, no-one knows how long digital data can be preserved, or how much more it will cost. Best estimates for most digital formats are around ten years, while a couple of years ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the organization behind the Academy Awards or Oscars) in its seminal report The Digital Dilemma estimated that long-term, secure digital preservation would cost about twelve times as much as conventional film preservation.

And do we trust the technology? All you need to see a film image is a light source. Once the equipment to retrieve a digital image is lost, the image is lost too. Then there is the question of security . Digital copies of commercial feature films are encrypted so that they can only be shown on specific projectors at specific times, in an effort to reduce illegal copying. Who knows when or where an archival copy will be required for screening?

And then the moral dilemma: we we want to see films the way their makers meant them to be seen. An archive needs to preserve film as film, even if we make digital copies as well. So what are we to do? Film? Digital? Both?

More later.

This blog was also published on the NFSA website on 2nd January 2011.

The barista – hairdresser or shoemender?

In my marketing course we learnt about the difference between shoemenders and hairdressers.

Of course there are plenty: for example they deal with different ends of the body. But this was all ab out the “Servicescape” – that is, the environment in which you do business with these providers. It proved a particularly useful distinction for me at work, in helping shift the film processing laboratory’s way of thinking to that of a digital postproduction house. Different headspace, different boots? Well it’s more than that.

The theory goes that when you need your shoes repaired, you simply go to the booth in the shopping mall and leave them there. The work isn’t done on the spot; it’s in some backroom somewhere, possibly off site in a workshop environment. You don’t know or care who does it or what their name is, and are don’t really care to stay around and watch the process or get involved in it. (“Could you try a touch more glue there, look, just under that corner of the heel?”). And there’s nothing really glamorous even about the sales counter. It’s functional, that’s all. You just drop the shoes off and pick them up a few days later. Job done.

The hairdresser is different. I’m not thinking of a traditional men’s barber (short back’n’sides, half price on Tuesdays). The modern hairdresser is quite different. For one thing you can’t leave the job there to be collected later! So the working environment is important, as you’ll be there for the duration. The décor, the music, and the type of chatter you have to put up with, all figure strongly. If they offer coffee is it up to par? You might ask your friends for recommendations before you walk into a new place. And you’ll want to know who is going to do your hair, and probably request them by name after you’ve been a couple of times. Finally, you are going to be involved all along. (How do you like that? A bit less weight on top, do you think?)

It worked that way for the film laboratory – shoe-mender model: you drop the film off to be processed – out the back where it smelt of chemicals but who cares, you aren’t going there. (Probably you don’t even go to the lab, it’s the runner who takes it). You don’t know the name of the processing operator, or which brand of chemicals will be used. And the film despatch counter is probably no more customer-friendly than the shoe-repair booth.

The digital post house is the hairdresser in this story. The environment is everything. The coffee machine almost as critical as the grading suite: you will certainly request a particular colourist (see, it is like a hairdresser), and you’ll certainly seek recommendations before you commit to a new place. Once you are there, you’ll be deeply involved with the whole process, and probably get to know the staff looking after you quite well.

It’s a clear distinction. Different businesses work on different levels of customer/employee contact, and build the business environment to match.

So where does the barista fit in? Many of us grab a coffee on the way to work – or duck out during the day to get a shot of caffeine. It’s become important that the coffee is just right. Baristas are as precious as good hair stylists, and customers will follow them from one place to another. They get to know you, and a good barista will get to know your choice of coffee shot after a day or two (so many of them are ‘he’, have you noticed?). There’s the daily chat, a bit of ‘attitude’ and pride in serving the best possible cup of coffee. Clearly this is the hairdresser model, not the shoemender (who’d probably serve you a weak instant coffee in a paper cup, with no ‘tude).

So what is it with the servicescape in a coffee shop? The most sought-after coffee places are crowded, uncomfortable (the most popular one up the road offers milk crates to sit on), and noisy. The coffee grinder makes a racket, drowning out the noise of the bus going past right outside, and the customers are all shouting at each other to get over all that other noise. Surely it’s not an environment you’d build deliberately to attract people. And yet, the place up the road that had big comfy sofas to sit on, peace and quiet, a door that actually closed to keep the street noise out, went out of business. (Of course it was Starbucks which explains a lot).

I think the Servicescape theory works well at either end of the body – heads and feet – but it’s got a bit of explaining to do before it can account for what goes in between.

Film: preserved, restored, reconstructed.

I’ve been thinking about film preservation. Not unusual for someone working in the National Film and Sound Archive I suppose.

But in fact my thoughts were triggered by a comment by NFSA’s Curator Emeritus Ray Edmondson a last month, in response to a comment that a particular film had “been preserved”.

“You can’t ever say a film has ‘been preserved’” he said. “It’s an ongoing task.”

His point is a good one. Acquiring the negative of a film, or making a new, top quality duplicate negative on modern polyester stock is only the start of the task. We still have to look after that negative, in the correct storage environment, monitor its condition (along with a million other items) and maybe use it on occasions to replace access copies that have become damaged or worn by use. Passive preservation involves looking after the existing material in optimum conditions: active preservation involves copying the original onto newer, longer-lasting materials. In the case of older (and not always so very old) titles, it might turn out one day that a better quality, or more complete version, of the film is discovered, in which case the present archival copy can be superseded by a better one.

So just like the old cliché of painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the job of preservation is never-ending.

While we are on the subject, there are several other terms that I hear used, sometimes interchangeably, with preservation. They all mean quite different things and the difference can be very significant.

Take the NFSA Deluxe Kodak project for example. Each year NFSA makes new prints of five feature film titles from the past forty or so years, together with remastered sound negatives and new duplicate negatives for preservation.  There is sometimes considerable work in identifying the best elements to work from, but apart from more thorough than usual negative cleaning, the job is simply one of re-establishing the right colour grading (working with the original director and cinematographer – sometimes even the original grader) and making new prints. I’d call it just that, in the hierarchy of terms I’m putting together: reprinting.

Wake in Fright comes from that period, but producing new screening prints involved a lot  more than reprinting. The colours on the negative had faded badly, and it wasn’t in great condition. Is this case, the entire film was scanned digitally, cleaned and colour-corrected frame-by-frame, and then re-recorded back to a 35mm negative, and printed. This is a good example of restoration. It’s a whole level up from plain reprinting.

The end product of both these operations is a print that is as close as possible to a new print from the original release. There is no creative change involved, and this is generally a guiding principle for archivists of all sorts.

The same principle ideally applies to the next level up, which is reconstruction. However, in instances where the complete original negative is no longer available, or where parts are too damaged to use, there has to be some creative interpolation. For example, The Sentimental Bloke (1919) existed in two forms, both imperfect. The complete and original cut of the film was copied to 16mm half a century ago, and consequently was of poor quality with grainy indistinct and poorly-framed images. The original negative was found in the USA, but it had been cut down to a shorter version with American intertitles. The tints and tones of the original prints survived in a tantalizingly small number of single frames, and even those were badly faded.

So a considerable degree of judgment was needed to put the bits back together, and to create new intertitles where the old ones were cut out and lost. The result may be close to what the original film looked like – in its Australian version – but it is most unlikely to be the same.

Other films have had to have much more interpretive work done to achieve a watchable product. For example the shrunken and badly decayed fragments of The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) that have survived were very extensively repaired, and interspersed with black frames to replace those parts of the reel that were totally disintegrated.

Finally, although it usually falls outside the mandate of an Archive, a number of films have been re-interpreted. New, modern soundtracks for silent films; re-edits to suit a different purpose; or simply replacement of sections previously excised by the director, the production company or the censor.

It’s not always clear cut. First Contact (1983) was at the borderline between reprinting and  reconstruction. The film was made originally in 16mm. NFSA decided to make a 35mm print for theatrical screenings, and this was achieved by means of a digital scan, a colour grade, and record out to 35mm film. It was a digital intermediate process, resulting in a new format print, and the few subtitles were recreated: but there were no creative changes, and the film wasn’t restored in the sense of a frame-by-frame clean-up.

So that’s it. Reprinting is just a clean-up: restoration is major repair work on a complete film: reconstruction is creating a new, altered work from original components: and preservation is the ongoing business of ensuring that the film will be available in years – even centuries – to come.

Also published on NFSA blog on 1 October 2010

Populism, peer review or poppycock?

How do we break the impasse on Climate Change? At the moment it’s all talk and very little action. And yet we know that every day spent talking makes the tast of reversing the CO2 build-up that much harder.

The technology is available to convert all our power stations to renewable energy sources. Yes, we can do this. But instead of getting on with it, what is proposed?  A 150-strong Citizens’ Assembly will be appointed to examine the evidence on climate change, the case for action and a market based approach to reducing pollution.

Hmm.

Surveys show that an overwhelming majority of people agree that Climate Change is real, and action is needed.  So what’s wrong? Is this a good example of the failure of surveys to distinguish attitudes from behaviour? Or is it a case of political leaders not only not leading, but not even following?

Or is it simply that the fossil fuel lobby is very powerful and well organised? The miners certainly showed their strength and ability to turn public opinion rcently when it came to the Mining Profits Super Tax.

The Citizens’ assembly approach seems to be a bit like the way John Howard aborted the Republican debate – although he appeared to put a mechanism in place to move forward, he actually led it into a blind alley by changing the argument.

The best way that the fossil fuel lobby can skew opinion in their favour is to go over the old ground again and again, feeding off the few remaining climate change deniers, and never letting the argument go forward to the much clearer arguments. After all, changing technology is simple compared with understanding how the global ecosystem works.

So, in the face of this, how do we communicate the imperatives of Climate Change?

We need to stop the “save the earth” rhetoric. It’s wrong and it trivialises the argument. And we need to stop the “climate change” rhetoric too. There are too many deniers around, and it’s easy to get sidetracked into flat-earth type arguments with simpletons, or to be accused of negativism and predictions of doom. 

So, how should we communicate?

The word “sustainable” is getting dragged into every corner these days for a good reason. It works. It seems to mean something to people. People don’t like change, and generally don’t understand it, and “sustainable” systems are those that can go on and on without change. I get a strong sense that people often wring their hands about Climate Change – seeing it correctly as a global problem, but incorrectly as something that an individual or even a smallish country can’t influence. But they are much more comfortable thinking about sustainability,  as it’s something they can tackle in their own life, in their backyard or on their roof. Next step, building momentum, companies and governments can adopt sustainable solutions.

Sustainable systems use renewable resources. And renewable is do-able.