Chris Jones's Blog, page 6
March 11, 2022
The Impact Premiere Is Postponed AND Rebooted!
OK we are going LARGE and it’s SUPER EXCITING!
Say goodbye to an online premiere and HELLO DARLING to a red carpet, BIG AWARDS ceremony and HUGE SCREEN premiere with VIP after party.
I have taken the decision to GO MASSIVE.
It was a simple choice really. We made a movie and this movie deserves to be premiered on a HUGE cinema screen.
Plus, if we do not screen in Cinema’s we cannot get the TWO world records we are going to get if we do screen in cinemas.
So the March the 19th online premiere is now postponed until after the ‘in-real-life’, yes in actual real life, world premiere some time in May or June in London. I had hoped to announce the date and venue now, but we are still talking to cinemas and cutting deals.
SO if ever there were an extraordinary event to come and join in, to kick the Covid apocalypse into the past, this is it!
We will expect over 500 guests, many from the industry, to come and celebrate, as well as witness TWO, yes TWO World Record Attempts on the night (most screenwriters on a feature film and most film directors on a feature film).
There will be photographers to take pix of you and your loved ones on the red carpet which you can share. Everyone will also get a movie poster too. And the whole event is funding both itself and the cost of festival submissions later this year. And there’s the awards too!
And if you can’t make it to London, we will of course still be running an online premiere later, dates TBC.
Tickets will likely be £19.99 and as I said, all proceeds go to covering the costs of the venue hire, awards, posters, BBFC classification and the subsequent festival run.
So go on, dust of your tux, dry clean your best frock and get ready for the most FABULOUS celebration and movie of 2022!
Expect updates on then date and venue VERY soon!
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
events, books and free film making tools
February 9, 2022
Impact50: The Final Cut
I say the final cut. I am of course still cutting. But it’s close. Very close.
So close that I finished it last week. Then I realised I knew I had to do yet another recut.
With the premiere looming, the vice is tightening. There’s nothing like a good deadline to get the creative cogs spinning and the creative soul innovating new ideas.
But let’s back up a bit.
No-one, least of all me, thought that Impact50 would take nearly eight years from conception to completion. There will be time after the premiere to dissect and analyse why it took so long, but Covid clearly stole the last two of those years as I found myself completely dominated with the London Screenwriters’ Festival.
The final cut has also passed through three editors before I finally bit the bullet myself and committed to completing it. Vicky Tolidou, Giovani Todeschini and McKayla Cox all spent time battling with the edit.
At each round of editing we would bump up against all manner of challenges.
I had wanted to intercut the films but it became increasingly clear that because almost all films featured beats from the beginning, middle and end of the movie, it would be impossible for audiences to remember or connect with characters they may see only three times and with 45 minutes separating each clip.
Finally I relented and I decided just edit the films together, one after another with no intercutting. That was finished last week. And it was good.
Earlier this week though, I had an idea.
To go back to the plan I had with McKayla Cox where we take 15 minute chunks and make kind of mini acts from them. Each act with a beginning, middle and end.
And it worked!
It’s not a rigid formula, sometimes there are three films just played in order, sometimes two intercut, sometimes four. But it works. It’s about pace and rhythm way more than attempting to stick to a linear timeline. Something that had really halted myself and all three prior editors.
Breaking out of the mindset of ‘it has to be linear’ was key to getting it completed.
I am so excited to share the film with the world. So much talent is on show.
OK back to the cutting room for me.
Get your tickets here…
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
events, books and free film making tools
February 3, 2022
Facebook and Instagram Jail… A Cautionary Tale…
About three weeks ago my Facebook account was hacked.
I don’t want to go into details of the ‘how’ as it was a sophisticated hack, and I am still unsure of how they did it. The bottom line is that the platform is very far from secure.
Tumbling from this I then also lost my personal Instagram and London Screenwriters Festival Instagram accounts.
How? Again, I just don’t know for sure. I have different emails and long passwords on both accounts and I change them regularly after major projects.
I am not naïve too, we live in a world of cyber threats.
What has REALLY irked me is that absolute contempt in which Meta (aka Facebook) holds its users.
It’s clear that we users are not human beings. We are simply data to Meta. To be exploited for gain. I should not be surprised.
I had been on and off Facebook for about a year before the hack, but I did use it for three main reasons…
1. The businesses
2. Personal updates that I wanted to share
3. Contacting people that I don’t have an email for
So yeah, Facebook was pretty useful and I was happy to pay the devil for that value… Their advertising and within reason, my data, in return for the platform.
But it seems the devil has no use for me now.
Most recently my mum died as well as an old friend. Many people had commented on those two posts and now they are gone into the black hole. I had planned to circle back and re-read and send ‘thankyous.’
And having just announced Impact50 is being premiered, I can’t update the Create50 page as I was the sole moderator. So now it’s an orphaned page. No owner exists. It will never be updated ever again (unless my account is reinstated).
So this is a cautionary tale. Not so much about cyber security, which I take very seriously. And most people do.
But about platforms and their indifference to us as human beings.
I had been on Facebook for around 15 years now. I had over 4,000 relationships. And many tens of thousands of other relationships on pages and groups (some of which I may be able to recover as there are multiple admins.)
In all of that time I have never had a post questioned by Facebook.
And yet, three weeks ago at 2:30am, someone or something posted TEN times in TEN MINUTES and by 2:49am the account was suspended. Spotted by an AI or algorithm I suspect.
The next morning, I had a simple message.
Your account is suspended for community violations. You have 30 days to appeal.
Would you like to appeal? Yes or no?
I clicked yes.
And that’s it. Logging in now just shows the message below…
I have a few days left before time runs out and my account is permanently deleted.
It was pretty much the same deal on Instagram.
Could I see the offensive posts that got me banned? No.
Could their super mega brilliant AI figure out at this might not have been me posting? No.
Is there anyone, anything, anywhere that I can ask questions? No.
It’s just ‘speak to Meta the hand’.
No matter what I do or where I go, I get the same short messages saying your account is suspended and there’s nothing you can do.
While I do used Facebook for business, I am glad that I don’t have a Facebook Business. If I did, I would be screwed.
So what to do?
It’s possible my old account could be resurrected, but with every day that feels less likely.
But beyond that, there’s nothing I can do aside from what I have done. Create a new account.
Maybe it’s a sign. To really step away from Social Media. I choose to see it that way.
And if you rely on Facebook or Instagram for business, build yourself some backup accounts now, so that every page or group that you moderate, has secondary access.
Still, all of this feels like so weird digital betrayal of trust.
So yeah. Tighten your security.
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
events, books and free film making tools
February 2, 2022
Announcing The World Premiere of Impact50!
{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/chrisjonesblog.com\/2022\/02\/announcing-the-world-premiere-of-impact50.html#arve-vimeo-67267718261fb613e7c1f7536192340","type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/672677182?h=e3f7213346&dnt=1&app_id=122963&html5=1&title=1&byline=0&portrait=0&width=100%25&autoplay=0"} Get out your tux or fancy sequined dress…
…pour a glass of wine, cup of coffee or herbal tea and settle in for the end of the world! Nearly seven years in the making. And we aren’t talking about the other apocalypse! You know the Covid one.
It’s been an epic journey but Impact50, our crowd-created feature film made out of the London Screenwriters’ Festival community is going to have its World Premiere online on March 19th 2022 at 8:00pm UK time.
Frankly I cannot believe it.
The challenges faced during this gargantuan process have been at times, overwhelming.
But we did it. We got there.
And I look forward to sharing the journey on the night of the premiere. As well as the film too. And it’s quite something to watch. Poignant and hard hitting at times. As a community, we have made something pretty special.
Filmmakers, writers, actors and backers will be joining us from all over the world for the premiere. And you are invited too.
Tickets are free but you will need to register for yours as seats on the livestream are limited.
There’s a maximum of two tickets per person, but anyone can register. Please ask your cast and crew to register for their online tickets if they want to attend. Family and friends are also welcome.
The film will be streamed on the website AND on a private Facebook page at 8:00pm UK time, March 19th 2022.
We will not be putting the film online directly after the premier as we plan a festival run to gather some awards.
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
events, books and free film making tools
December 13, 2021
Remember That Time We Published Two Xmas Books?
It seems about two thousand years ago, as in this time last year, that we published two books for Xmas. One a kids book, the other a collection of Christmas ghost stories. Both are on Amazon globally and both feature stories written by new writers in the LondonSWF community.
So if you want a unique book for a youngster, or definitely NOT a youngster… take a look and grab one.
Santa’s Bedtime Book Of Adventure Stories: 25 magical Christmas stories from 25 imaginations….Buckle up for an exciting sleigh ride!
Join Santa on a magical, imaginative Christmas adventure and discover the world’s smallest giant, a planet of colourless aliens, snowed in tooth fairies, a lonely superhero, witches in search of yuletide spirit, a back-to-front girl, lots and lots of naughty animals, and a self important sock in need of a lesson! Inventive Christmas tales with timeless messages from twenty five new and eclectic writers. Unleash the imagination!
Twisted50: Ghosts Of Christmas: A collection of winter spine tinglersOpen up this advent calendar of terror, for the 25 spine tingling days of Christmas. Unsettle in for a Christmas feast that will always be served chilled… to the bone. We all love a good Christmas ghost story or horror movie. If Hammer House of Horror, Tales of the Unexpected and Pans Books of Horror set your pulse racing and mind spinning as a youngster, then these stories, set at Christmas, offer the darkest recesses of your mind, a deliciously macabre feast in which to indulge itself.
Thanks for supporting the LondonSWF community and of course a big shout out to the team who made it happen… Savannah, Bob, Mark, Emma and Elinor.
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
events, books and free film making tools
September 1, 2021
This Girl is on Fire by Emma Johnson
This Girl is on Fire by Emma Johnson
“Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise.
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise.”
Maya Angelou
There is a moment, just before you step onto hot coals, where the whole world seems to hold its breath. The guiding arm in front of you falls away, and there is nothing stopping you, the path ahead is clear. And although it’s just a small step forward, it feels like a vast black void of impossibility.
The heat from the coals is intense. You can feel it pressing against your skin, your legs, your trembling hands. You can hear it burning, a crackling hum that stretches out in the night beyond. The only light is from the coals. You look down at the glowing red embers, and all around, pressing close are people, holding their breath too, some whooping with encouragement, hands pressed to their faces, wondering if this final step is truly a step you can take.
And then, just when it feels impossible, ahead of you, through the flickering sparks from the fire, stands a man. He is looking at you, and only you. His whole gaze seems to come from across the fire and onto your face, white and humbled by the night. This alone is impossible to stand. If you have lived your life trying to be invisible, trying not to count, trying not to take up too much space, to have all the energy and focus of this moment directed just at you feels entirely alien.
Behind you, some of the most extraordinarily brave and broken women you know are shouting your name. Behind them stands your family, smiles and awe cracked across their faces, the children jumping up and down on the wet grass. In that moment, you are mummy, wife, daughter, friend, sister, leader, follower, broken, hopeful, powerful, firewalker.
And you are totally, absolutely there. There is no escaping it. This is a moment for you. This is ALL about you. You DO matter. You are NOT too much. You are completely you. And you are here, in this moment. Now.
You raise you hands to your hips, echoing the warrior woman stance you have practised earlier in the day, in an exercise that you weren’t sure would make a blind bit of difference to your ability to walk on fire. And yet, as you stand, framed in this powerful silhouette, staring straight ahead, you feel the possibility rush through you. You jump up and down on the spot a couple of times, feeling your feet connecting with the earth, feeling the power juddering through you.
“Are you ready,” shouts Chris from across the coals. Eyes up, looking right back at him, meeting his gaze. “Yes,” you shout, in a guttural cry that comes right from the very bottom of your soul.
“What is your name?” he asks. Closing your eyes for a moment, you reach inside for the strength to shout your chosen warrior name out.
“Right Fucking Here,” you yell into the night, into the crowd, into the fire, into the past of a life where you told yourself that you didn’t count, that you didn’t deserve all the things you hoped for. Your voice is like nothing you’ve heard before – strong, loud, cracking with emotion, pinched with pain, wobbly with courage. It is time.
“Walk,” commands Chris. And there is nothing between you and the fire now. You step out, never taking your eyes off Chris. Beneath you, the coals are so hot, like boiling rubble underfoot. It is a powerful feeling, but you are more powerful. With each step, the fire intensifies, but so does your strength.
Six, maybe seven paces, and you’re across the fire. Chris grabs you in a powerful hold, his hands clasping the tops of your arms, you jumping from foot to foot to kick off any stray embers.
“Yes,” he says quietly. “Yes.” And you are dancing away from the fire – a smile writ large across your face, tears swirling in your eyes. You are bursting with possibility now, power surging through you, strength fizzing in your fingertips, courage coursing through your veins. Giddy with knowledge. Warrior. Firewalker. Woman.
“Mummy!” call your children. Their eyes bright with pride, they reach their hands to your face, unable to believe this firewalking goddess is real. Your husband looks at you as if he has never seen you before, wonder all over his face. Your mother smiles back at you through the darkness, a fellow firewalker, she just knows.
You walk the fire two more times that night – on the last time, the coals are 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, flames are licking at the edges. You walk with total joy, whooping as you finish, sparks kicking from your heels.
Later that night, you will find the only mark left from the fire, a crescent-shaped fire kiss, curled around on the sole of your left foot. But otherwise, your feet are unscathed. You are not burnt. You are not in pain. You are simply alive, truly present and right fucking here.
Walking on fire with Chris Jones and his extraordinary team was one of the great privileges of my life. From the moment I entered the room, until we had crossed the coals for that last time, I felt so held, so seen, so acknowledged. “Thank you for getting up and carrying the load. Every day. For what you do. You’re fucking warrior mums,” said Chris at one point, which brought most of us to tears.
The training was a true glimpse into another world of possibility, an extraordinary experience with inspiring, beautiful, thoughtful people. It was truth, and courage, and incredible joy. I am part of the fire tribe now. I belong.
Firewalking is not something you just rock up and do. It takes enormous preparation and commitment to the moment. We walked at 9pm, but we started the process at 3pm. It was a room charged with emotion, not least because it was filled with 24 women who had all experienced crippling post-natal depression, anxiety, psychosis and OCD.
We were raising money for Shine, a charity which supports women through creativity, peer support and a solid network of friendship and solidarity. To say they needed this firewalk, would be an understatement. All of us have had moments of black despair from which we never thought we would recover, but all of us have stood up, got up and kept going. We were phoenixes in every sense of the word. We just didn’t know it yet.
But, it turns out, Chris needed this firewalk too. With inspiring honesty, he explained that this was his first firewalk since COVID hit, and his sense of trepidation was clear. He’d also never spoken to an entirely female group before. He was a father, but he wasn’t a mother, and he had no experience of PND. Could he do this, he asked us? And of course, it was this moment of candour that meant he could. His willingness to be vulnerable, gave us all permission to do the same.
As he slowly, but lovingly, broke us down and then built us up, we started to connect with the things that were holding us back, facing truths, acknowledging pain. We cried, a lot. But we also laughed, danced, hugged. We found solutions to dealing with the bitter voice inside that tries to bring us down, and we discovered that our collective power could help others do things they were afraid of. We wrote the worst things we think about ourselves on pieces of broken glass, and then walked across that glass in bare feet. The cracking sound underfoot making us tremble.
Later, when we sat in a circle for what was meant to be a brief session of sharing, we saw the effect that Chris’s vulnerability had given us all. Every single woman, even those terrified of speaking in public, took the microphone to share their stories. As if a tap had been turned on after years of being rusted shut, pain and grief poured forth from us all. No-one held back, everyone exposed their shattered, fragile hearts to the group around them, and found those hearts carefully picked up and returned to them with love and total acceptance.
The sharing session ran for over an hour. We were clearly so late for our firewalk. But Chris – who later said he was both silenced and humbled by the incredible courage of these 24 women – held that space for us in a beautiful way.
As then, as we dried our eyes, and reached out to our friends for comfort, we took off our shoes, felt our feet on the floor, and stood together – a tribe now, after all we had shared and overcome – and prepared to walk on fire.
In these last moments, there is such a powerful transformation, such an incredible moment of reaching inside to find your warrior, of roaring like a banshee into the night. Outside the hall, our families were gathered, listening to our warrior cries, a thought that only made us shout all the louder.
And it was here that we faced our fears. It was here that I truly understood what firewalking can do. There’s no clever magic, no technique for walking, no voodoo science. It is about finding your way through the fear of what’s ahead, and stepping forward with intention. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
“You will still face crises in your life,” explained Chris. “And the fire is like a mini life crisis. Your fear of it will show up in your body like a crisis. And then we will take that fear, that feeling, and we will deal with it. We will walk on the fire anyway. We will show our bodies and minds that there is another way to face adversity.”
And, if there is a big ‘secret’ to walking on fire, it’s this. There is no secret. The truth is, if you walk quickly enough, with intention and focus, if you don’t wobble, you won’t get burnt. If you focus on that warm, generous face on the other side of the coals, if you just step forward, and keep going, you can walk on hot coals and come away completely unscathed. If you feel that fear, and do it anyway, you realise that the worst thing of it all, was the fear, not the walk. Because truly, the biggest thing to fear in life, is fear itself.
And so, we walked. Some of us cried, and stared at the heavens. Some of needed the collective swell of love that we all felt from our firetribe girls. Everyone reached deeper inside themselves than they had ever gone before. “I’m a fighter,” shouted Claire. “Yes, you are,” said Chris, when she reached the other side.
“Rainbow warrior,” called Charlie into the night, evoking the memory of someone lost but deeply loved. “Self-belief mother fucking warrior,” shouted Shona, fist pumping the air, who has already walked on fire once, but found herself overcome with emotion as she stared the coals down again.
“Wonder Trace,” called Tracey, her voice cracking with emotion as she stepped forward, breaking down in Chris’s arms as she faced her own power.
“Lionness mother,” called out Becs, as she walked with such grace into a bolder future. “I will survive,” said Zoe, courage and vulnerability all over her face as she walked.
“Valkyrie,” screamed Rebecca, her name drawing a roar from all the girls, as she stepped forward into the embers, single-minded, powerful.
And we were all Valkyries. Phoenixes from the flames. Firewalking warriors. Goddesses.
We stood together, and we walked together. A sisterhood born out of pain, and fused together by courage.
This is the power of firewalking. Yes, we walked across fire. Yes, we faced our fears. Yes, we can do the impossible. And we are stronger together. No longer will we suffer in silence. No longer will we hide behind our masks. We matter. Our feelings matter. Our pain matters. And our strength will set us, and others, free.
We have seen the truth and power in vulnerability, we have seen each other’s hearts. And we are warriors.
“She’s got both feet on the ground, and she’s burning it down…she’s got her head in the clouds, and she’s not backing down. This girl is on fire, she’s walking on fire. She looks like a girl, but she’s a flame, so bright she can burn your eyes. You can try but you’ll never forget her name, she’s on top of the world, and she’s walking on fire.”
Alicia Keys
Support Shine here… www.Firewalk.news/shine
August 9, 2021
The London Screenwriters’ Festival HYBRID Is Going Ahead
It’s just over one month to the three days onstage in London. But the Screenwriters Festival this year is also SOOOO much more, especially for those who want to stay home and do it all online.
Firstly, so yes, everything will be made available online.
All the events over the weekend of the 10th to 12th on stage in London, where the speaker has given permission, will be filmed and uploaded later.
On the 24th of September we launch an additional online-only section of the festival, running to October 10th. All live. All recorded and available for one year. That’s on top of the Zoom room chats, meet the expert sessions and other online events already happening.
PLUS… Pitchfest is 100% online, as well as other initiatives.
AND… LSFConnect.com v2.0 is now live for delegates, with ten years’ worth of seminars, sessions and events. It’s around 600 individual events now, all indexed and available to watch right away.
You can get your pass HERE and make your own festival journey now… Enjoy it ALL from your home and online, or do that and ALSO attend in person over the weekend of September 10th to 12th (Covid restrictions will apply for all our safety).
We promised we would deliver something extraordinary and safe. And that’s what we are doing.
You can read more about the festival HERE http://www.londonscreenwritersfestival.com/
You can get your pass HERE http://www.londonscreenwritersfestival.com/tickets/
You can read feedback about past festivals HERE http://www.londonscreenwritersfestival.com/londonswf-feedback-archives/
Look, the biggest Screenwriting extravaganza this side of Christmas is already underway online.
Yes, it’s us!
Join now and spend the next three months with us, exploring story, improving your writing, creating new relationships, gaining confidence (we all need that right now), pitching your projects and just immersing yourself in that thing we ALL love… Screenwriting.
Most of all I know these two things to be true.
It’s who you hang out with daily that makes a real difference. We have three months of hanging out planned. And if your life is like mine and the last 18 months have been a challenge, we could really use regular community interaction to keep injecting creative rocket-fuel into our soul!
Second, sustained routine is key… We have so much going on, you will constantly be reminded to keep going and offered valuable insight into how to improve on your journey. You will feel the presence of others every step of the way, helping and encouraging you as you go.
Join us. We have spent too much time apart. And it will be splendid! Promise.
Chris Jones
http://www.londonscreenwritersfestival.com
May 18, 2021
Do you have a genre script, under 100 pages, suited to low budget production?
[image error]
[image error]
Next year I am planning to make a low budget feature film and I am inviting submissions. It’s time to get back on set!
The emphasis here is low budget and we ALL need to go into this with our eyes wide open. There will be rewrites, collaboration and plenty of compromise. Money will be in VERY short supply and where possible be spent on-screen.
I am looking for genre films with the exception of comedy. That’s not to say your script can’t be funny. Very funny even. It’s just not an outright comedy. I hope you can understand this distinction.
If your submission makes it past our first round, you MAY get a script report from us. The team at the London Screenwriters’ Festival is enrolled into this mammoth task.
We plan to share all our reports with the writers who advance for further consideration.
That said, this is NOT a promise to do so. And if I regret making this offer, for any reason, I will withdraw it.
We will also need a cracking one liner and synopsis / one pager from you. So have that ready BEFORE you submit.
Consider your title too, it’s our very first impression of your work.
What we are looking for…
Genre script (any except comedy, but can include funny scripts)100 pages or fewerOwn 100% of copyright / IPLimited characters and locations (deigned for low budget)Set in present-ish day (no period settings)Submissions must be PDF (text)Logline and short synopsis included (text)Your name and email on the cover sheetWho we are looking for…
Writers who will collaborate on inevitable rewritesWriters who want to stay involved in the entire process and support itWriters who are fast and enjoy the processWhy? Opportunities…
So the money won’t be good. It may even be so little as to be near zero. If that’s the case, you will be standing alongside everyone else, including myself, not getting paid.
This is an opportunity for a writer who wants to go through the process of production, collaboration and even beyond into sales if they want. It’s an opportunity to learn by doing.
It’s also a credible opportunity to get produced.
I stress I am promising little more than a credit, the opportunity for experience, to get produced and to inevitably make new relationships. Again eyes wide open here, as are mine.
OK so if you are buzzing at this opportunity you can start your submission process HERE…
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
events, books and free film making tools
April 11, 2021
Digital Archiving… 35mm Negs and what we can learn from Scanning The Past
Scan of a Kodak neg from a short I made on VHS in 1987 called ‘Goldfish’.
We live in a digital age where we are creating SOOOO much data, very few of us are archiving with an eye on the future. Or at least the long term future.
For some reason, at a very early age, I realised that I should archive everything I create, ideally at the best quality, or better, archive all the original material. This included the 35mm negatives from the photos I would shoot. Almost everyone I knew back then would throw the negs away in due course, ‘I have the colour prints, why keep them?’
Well.
The negs that I shot, and some I rescued from others, have been in a shoe box for 30 years or so. Four months ago I began the process of scanning them in for digital archiving.
And as a bonus irony, and in true technological evolution, it needs to be done sooner rather than later. The film technology is all but gone, but now the scanners that capture hi res 35mm negs are themselves becoming obsolete.
It’s like those D1, DigiBeta, 1”, U-matic tapes… We may have the masters, we just cannot play the back as the players are disappearing.
I will get into what I have learned during the process of scanning these negs in a moment, but I want to circle back to the digital ticking time bomb that is our data. Specifically, the stuff we have made, where we store it, what we do with it etc., and where it will be in 20 years from now.
Only recently my friend Stuart Hazeldine had the agonising challenge of deciding what to do with his 35mm camera neg for his film ‘Exam’. It’s a LOT of stuff, it’s heavy, bulky and well frankly, will anyone EVER look at it again? He has a 2k scan of the neg and so on balance, he decided to junk it. But it was a hard choice.
Many of us have tapes, stills negs, cinefilm neg, files, drives… and most are scattered to the four winds. I myself have no idea where the neg for two of my feature films reside (though this may be a blessing as I really don’t want to be tempted into remastering).
But… the point remains, how and where do we archive all our stuff? Digital stuff.
I have chosen to be pretty anal about archiving for some time and now have a premium Google Drive account that I share with other editors. We upload EVERYTHING there. I then mirror my stuff back down to two external sets of drives, one for local ‘deep storage’ and one for accessing on my desktop.
This means I have my original drives (in a box somewhere), an archived and tidied up folder in the Google cloud, a local set of drives on my desktop for immediate access to everything, and a second set of drives 100 miles away also mirroring that is a backup of the backup.
Overkill? Only until a drive fails, or Google shuts down GDrive. Then I promise it will seem very sensible.
OK. Check out some of these scans from over 30 year negatives!
The house where we lived in 1990, and shot ‘The Runner’. Neg scan from fufi stills stock, no grading, straight from the scanner.
Back to my 35mm scanning journey… Here’s what I have learned.
Software and Kit
I am using the Nikon Coolscan 4000 with Negative Adaptor and Transparency holder. You can still pick these up on eBay and it’s 100% worth it if you have a lot of negs or transparencies and want to do scan them right just the once. Apps and cheap neg scanners will give poor results so avoid them. I am saving files directly into Dropbox as I scan them, so I have a cloud backup right away. The software I am suing VueScan 9.0 from Hamrick software. It can handle almost all scanners and has really advanced functionality. It’s FANTASTIC!
The Nikon and VueScan will remove almost all the scratches and dust. AMAZING.
Use The Tools
The Nikon scanner and VueScan software work well together and include infra red dirt and scratch removal which is prey damn impressive. While my negs have been stored well for 30 years, the have still attracted dust, and some have original camera scratches etc. The software pretty much eliminates all these issues. It’s very impressive to see a before and after. I am also choosing to scan to a very high res, yielding images that are around 7mb each and then saved in low compression JPEG’s. Yes I could save to a lossless format, and maybe I should, but I also have thousands of images and it could get unwieldy.
Re-Archiving Physical Assets
As I go I am putting my negs into a proper folder too, something I could not afford back in the day. I doubt they will ever come out of this folder again in my lifetime, but the £30 investment on Amazon in a swanky folder and neg holders means I know they are protected, organised and they can sit on my shelf for another 30 years.
Recording narration for my 1986 SciFi epic shot on VHS, Starbeast. Fuji neg, no grading. Amazing!
Quick colour grade on the left, raw scan on the right. Unbranded neagtive, light leaks and strange neg deteriortaion ‘snowflakes’.
Not All Film Is The Same
While some of the unbranded 35mm negatives I shot back in the day are pretty good (I would use this film to save money), there is great variance in results. Some have stood the test of time pretty well, others have all manner of strange discolouring or surface distortions. None of the Kodak, Fuji, Agfa of Ilford stock seem to have these issues. To be fair, I also suspect some issues may be down to a light leaking camera at the time, as well as dodgy high street photo processing, something the youngsters of today would be astonished to know even existed. One hour photo processing and printing, remember that?
400ASA underexposed… yikes!
ASA and Underexposure
In this digital era of hypersensitive cameras and huge exposure latitude, I had forgotten just how grainy underexposed high ASA shot would be. Even at 400 ASA the grain is staggering. Yeah, digital REALLY has advantages in this regard. Just remembering shooting on Super 16mm film, the amount of light needed was always a major production issue. Something that is often overlooked when purists talk about how amazing the feel of film was. Yeah film, and the truck you needed for lights on even a micro shoot.
Always shoot into the light! 100ASA Kodak neg.
Stunning Results
Most negs have yielded a pretty good image, but the Kodak and Fuji, if well exposed at the time, offer stunning images. And if you have a special image or six, a few hours in photoshop can create truly breath-taking results.
Editing my first film on super 8mm, tech was VERY different then.
A Message For Professional Photographers…
Let the client have the RAW files. I have no idea why so many professionals get fussy about this. I always ask for RAW files not because I want to go in and re-grade, but because I know in ten years time, if I need them, the photographer will likely have disappeared or will have lost them. So give in, let the client have ALL the data for their deep storage.
Yeah… It will all end in tears!
In Conclusion…
Build your archiving solutions now and always consider, ‘will this medium be accessible in a decade?’ Remember, what we create is almost always reduced to a series of digital artefacts now, and like some episodes of Dr Who, you don’t want them to be lost forever.
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker
My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix
events, books and free film making tools
April 2, 2021
The London Screenwriters’ Festival to receive £42,015 from second round of the Government’s Culture Recovery Fund
The London Screenwriters’ Festival is delighted to announce that it has received a grant of £42,015 from the Government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund to help the organisation recover and reopen.
More than £300 million has been awarded to thousands of cultural organisations across the country including the festival, in the latest round of support from the Culture Recovery Fund, the Culture Secretary announced today.
The London Screenwriters’ Festival is one of the largest events for screenwriters in the world and was poised to run its tenth anniversary event to record breaking attendance in April of 2020 when the pandemic hit. The timing could not have been worse as so much investment and resources had been sunk into an event that could no longer be run, leaving the whole festival vulnerable. This grant secures an exciting and bright future for the festival with plans in place for the postponed LondonSWF’10 to now take place in September 2021.
Over £800 million in grants and loans has already been awarded to support almost 3,800 cinemas, performance venues, museums, heritage sites and other cultural organisations dealing with the immediate challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
The second round of awards made today will help organisations to look ahead to the spring and summer and plan for reopening and recovery. After months of closures and cancellations to contain the virus and save lives, this funding will be a much-needed helping hand for organisations transitioning back to normal in the months ahead.
Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, said:
“Our record breaking Culture Recovery Fund has already helped thousands of culture and heritage organisations across the country survive the biggest crisis they’ve ever faced.
Now we’re staying by their side as they prepare to welcome the public back through their doors – helping our cultural gems plan for reopening and thrive in the better times ahead.”
Chris Jones, founder of the London Screenwriters’ Festival said,
“The pandemic has really brought our festival to its knees. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the timing could not have been worse for us. We were just weeks away from our biggest event with a huge amount invested.
We managed to pivot online to deliver a free additional event for our delegates, creating what we felt was a world-class month long online festival in May and June 2020. We were excited that we could offer something that provided creative focus, connectivity with others and an an experience that was an enjoyable, positive distraction in the first few terrifying months of lockdown. That said, our future remianed uncertain.
Since then we have worked relentlessly to keep the lights on and energy elevated. We remain determined to return bigger, better, wiser and more inclusive. I cannot begin to express how much this award means to the whole team and we are deeply grateful. It will mean we can continue to serve emerging talent, screenwriters, filmmakers.”
Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England, said:
“Investing in a thriving cultural sector at the heart of communities is a vital part of helping the whole country to recover from the pandemic. These grants will help to re-open theatres, concert halls, and museums and will give artists and companies the opportunity to begin making new work.
We are grateful to the Government for this support and for recognising the paramount importance of culture to our sense of belonging and identity as individuals and as a society.”
The funding awarded today is from a £400 million pot which was held back last year to ensure the Culture Recovery Fund could continue to help organisations in need as the public health picture changed. The funding has been awarded by Arts Council England, as well as Historic England and National Lottery Heritage Fund and the British Film Institute.
Notes to Editors
Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our strategic vision in Let’s Create that by 2030 we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish and where everyone of us has access to a remarkable range of high quality cultural experiences. We invest public money from Government and The National Lottery to help support the sector and to deliver this vision. www.artscouncil.org.uk
Following the Covid-19 crisis, the Arts Council developed a £160 million Emergency Response Package, with nearly 90% coming from the National Lottery, for organisations and individuals needing support. We are also one of the bodies administering the Government’s Culture Recovery Fund. Find out more at www.artscouncil.org.uk/covid19.
At the Budget, the Chancellor announced the £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund would be boosted with a further £300 million investment. Details of this third round of funding will be announced soon.
#HereForCulture #LetsCreate
