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MillimeterNew Stock
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Sony Pictures Stock Footage has digitized more than 100,000 clips, which go back as far as 30 years. Sony has garnered a lot of use from its high-end pyrotechnics footage from lower-budget productions that can’t afford to stage and shoot their own explosions.
Sony Pictures Stock Footage
Sony Pictures has been the most aggressive studio by far in digitizing material and making it available, with more than 100,000 clips now on the company's website. The only thing Sony Pictures Stock Footage sells is what the studio has boxed up and classified as stock footage. Beginning in 2003, Sony Pictures started cataloging and digitizing its archive, which goes back about 30 years (before the company started running into copyright and storage problems). Last year, the company got everything online up to date.
“Basically, as soon as a production is hitting the DVD shelves, we can make the stock footage available for licensing,” says Rick Sievers, sales manager for the stock footage department. “As far as Spider-Man 3 goes, we have some amazing shots filmed on VistaVision, which is the 8-perf 35mm. They called it the ‘Spideycam,’ and they suspended cables throughout a several-block area in New York. So it's actually a POV as if you are flying between the buildings like Spider-Man from building to building. They suspend a remote-controlled camera from these cables, and then the camera can tilt and pan and zoom. You're pretty much flying down the canyons of New York between the buildings.”
Films are searchable by title, which is helpful to Sievers as well as the client. What is labeled as stock is the B-roll, second-unit, establishing shots — anything that doesn't show principal talent. This leaves plenty of quality footage. “We have gone ahead and cataloged a lot of the stunts and pyrotechnics — a lot of the really high production value shots that can be somewhat iconic in a movie,” Sievers says. “We've cataloged that into what we call our ‘Premium Collection.’ So some of those would require additional clearances, like stunt actors — they would have to be paid their day rates for TV or feature-film productions, but they are available.
“The same goes for explosions. Certainly one of the things Hollywood loves to do is blow things up. We've benefited from that, and we have a lot of high-end pyrotechnics that some of the lower-budget productions and TV shows and documentaries can really take advantage of to increase their production value at a tiny fraction of the cost that it would take to actually produce something like that themselves.”
Sony has converted everything to HD 1080/24p. The company makes an interpositive from the original camera negative and uses that as its production element to downconvert to Digi Beta or any other format required. Sony also goes back to the interpositive for 2K or 4K scans. The company has made no editorial or creative decisions as to what to archive. If there are five takes to a scene, it is all available. There is also very little color correcting. You're pretty much being offered raw footage to do with it what you will. “If you don't find it on our website and want to know if there is more, the answer is going to be ‘no,’” Sievers says.
One of Sievers' favorite recent acquisitions is from the little-seen film Stealth. “They put a VistaVision camera on a fighter jet and have these amazing cloud POVs doing maneuvers in and around clouds at really high rates of speed — flying through canyons and over all kinds of desert and mountainous terrain. It's unique. It's not sped up. It's really a fighter jet. We have some helicopter shots as well. We really benefited in the stock-footage department from that. It's been one of our best-selling titles.”
