Finally we were able to get David Berry to come on down. He spent the day looking through the footage and he was able to make some important distinctions for us. Including a specific piece of 16mm film that we could not account for. Everything else in the "Knotte Grosse" reels were 35mm, but there were three rolls of 16mm film. They were pieced together and significantly longer then anything else.
Remember, "Knotte Grosse" as a fragment film was only a series of loops. What does that mean exactly? Well, almost all the reels are all black (or clear) with a small bit of animation on them. The animation lasts for 16 frames or maybe 32 frames with 24 frames in a second that goes by very quickly. These few frames of animation are followed then by quite a few frames of black. The idea for the final film was that the 16 frame segment would be looped and looped, but since he had not gotten to the final piece yet he didn't need to actually make the loop.
So, these rolls of 16mm film were strange because they were continuous. It was 1000's, or really 10's of 1000's, of frames of animation with very little blackness. But it turned out from David that these were cut segments of "Heavy Light". Now, I'm certain that Mark would have figured this out if he could have put it in a projector, but since there was this confusion of what is negative and what is positive with the "Knotte Grosse" materials he made sure to be very careful with it.
After a few hours of going through rolls and rolls of film we all finally settled on a few rolls adding up to about 1000 ft of film. Now was the complicated bit. How do we get the film scanned with no funds to speak of?
Well, Mark knew that David Wilson, who'd helped in getting "Life in the Atom" scanned, had a standing offer to help get much of "Knotte Grosse" scanned as well. This proved to be a difficult process. If Mark is a busy guy then David is a constant blur whizzing around our world never sleeping. Eventually, though we went through another friend of Larry's to help us contact Rhythm & Hues to scan the film, Richard Hollander.
You see, the Hollywood movie industry is still very much full of people who work in film, there's a lot of digital, but still, a lot of film. And Rhythm & Hues being a Visual FX studio that gets hired by production studios that means they need to be able to work on both film and digital productions. So, they have a very high quality film scanner (a few, I believe). But since film is not used by everyone they are not using their film scanner all the time. So, in between a couple productions I was able to bring a nice large reel of "Knotte Grosse" rolls to R&H. They ended up giving us a nice 2K 16bit scan of the film.
This was really great for me because it meant I had quite a bit of latitude to color correct. The only thing I would have liked would be to have a color card or some skin tone (like I did for "Life in the Atom"). Yet, still it ended up looking really really good.
On the DVD we ended up keeping the film as one movie. We made no loops. This I think was a bit of a mistake, but by this point we had really pushed the schedule so far that I was really letting Larry and Pam make the decisions without much discussion. And really I didn't have too many points of disagreement with either of them. I really respect their decisions, but I feel that it's important if I disagree with something that I should speak up - politely, of course. But I hope that one day the loops can be shown as loops. Just as the "Light Show Loops" were included.
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