New Stock
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Last October, HBO Archives acquired The March of Time newsreel series, which was originally produced by Time. This series was started in 1935, but it includes footage from as early as 1913. Photo: Time Life Pictures
Stock houses are not what they used to be in your father's day. They're not even what they were on your last birthday.
If your production hasn't considered calling on a stock house for that tricky, remote, or expensive shot, you might want to reconsider and give them a visit. Many houses are now shooting their own material. Everything is in HD-or-better quality, or well on its way. They are trying to cover the planet, and chances are the shot you need is in a format that can be manipulated to fit your project.
Not only is the content more varied, the destinations and usage of the imagery are more varied as well. Gone are the days of the stock-house profile where the dusty, scratched archival footage arrives on Beta tape by FedEx. Footage houses today are developing fresh content for websites and digital displays that you can purchase over the Internet — sometimes very inexpensively. Several houses report that clients are increasingly opting to license hard- and expensive-to-shoot clips instead of shooting them themselves. Stock houses are becoming more story-conscious, and they are designing shoots with much more in mind than just selling you a single shot. One house even boasts that part of your film is already in the can, even though you haven't started shooting. Another is already delivering digital material in 4K.
However, this is not to diminish the worth or significance of those tried-and-true collections that are the repositories of our history and culture.
HBO Archives
HBO opened a clip-licensing division only as recently as 2004, starting out with sports and wildlife. Last October, HBO Archives (www.hboarchives.com) acquired The March of Time newsreel series. Originally produced by Time, the archive was sold to Getty Images in the 1970s — only to be bought back now that HBO is under the Time Warner umbrella.
“March of Time is very different from other newsreels because they were mini documentaries,” says Max Segal, director of licensing for HBO Archives. “They spent 20 minutes on single topics. They were the 60 Minutes of their time.”
You might remember the fictitious March of Time episode in the opening of Citizen Kane. Time started the series in 1935, but the company often incorporated earlier footage — some as early as 1913. The series continued into the early '50s, then it carried on as a documentary unit until 1967.
“We're real excited about it,” Segal says. “And it's different. Besides being full-length documentaries, they were shot more feature-style as opposed to run-and-gun news style of the Hollywood studios. We converted the 1930s dollar, and they basically spent about $750 grand per episode. It was a lot of money compared to what everyone else is doing.”
The March of Time was all shot in 35mm, and it covers subjects as varied as “White-Collar Girls,” political conventions, “Life with Grandpa,” “The Birth of Swing,” exposés on boxing and horseracing, and “The Palestine Problem.” The series won Time an Academy Award in 1936 for revolutionizing the newsreel. Not only did the company keep all its 35mm in good shape, the company kept all the paperwork. There is a signed release in the files from Albert Einstein.
“We're [totally] recataloging everything,” Segal says, “which hadn't been done before. In talking to documentary producers, we're cataloging everything more on a clip basis than on a program basis, so it will help them better with matches. You say, ‘Well, you know, I have a 1935 milkman shot, but it's buried in this hour show.’ We're not doing that.
“We have a digital partner, Thought Equity [Motion], of Colorado, and they've been helping us restore the footage through a very expensive processor called ‘the archangel.’ The first thing we wanted to do was grab what we could grab, recatalog it, and get it out there. Now, the next step is we are going to take that 35 — with the help of Thought Equity — and we're going to start to convert it to HD. The HD part we're just starting.”
HBO Archives also carries contemporary material, mostly B-roll from its documentaries, such as its recent film Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry — all shot in HD, of course.
