VFX Voice - Fall 2017

“In the history of restoration, I’ve never seen such a crazy
project,” says Séverine Wemaere, who was running the now-defunct
Technicolor Film Foundation that partnered in the restoration
with Lobster Films, whose principals – Serge Bromberg and
Eric Lange – were the private collectors that found and acquired
the tattered treasure.
“It was 13,375 frames that were completely fragmented and we
had to put together like a huge puzzle,” Wemaere adds. This was
done in Los Angeles by Tom Burton, who headed up Technicolor
Creative Services at the time of the restoration, and his team. It
would take 20 years and $1 million from the time of the ruined
masterpiece’s discovery until its reappearance, in all its original
splendor, to an appreciative audience at the opening night of the
2011 Festival de Cannes. The film then toured the world, exhibited
at museums and film festivals, often as a double bill with The
Extraordinary Voyage, the restoration documentary directed by
Bromberg and Lange.
“A rocket in the eye of moon, what a bizarre idea!” Bromberg
says early on in the film, while the notion of ever being able to
repair Méliès’s lost masterpiece must have seemed no less strange.
Contained in a single reel, the 15 minutes of footage had melted
and congealed into what was described as “a large hockey puck.”
The sticky configuration was helped along by the fact that in
Méliès’s day, black and white films were hand-painted using
dyes that were mixed with glue. The process, which was reserved
for A-list movies, was undertaken by assembly lines of up to
200 women.
The process of separating the rigid, compact mass was arduous,
and took team Lobster many years. Although they were initially
told the print was irretrievable, their experiments prying it apart
led to the discovery that only the edges were stuck; the central
frames, though scratched and dirty, were relatively intact. Progress
was by the centimeter and took weeks.
Once unwound, the brittle reel was sent to the Haghefilm
Digitaal in the Netherlands, where it was treated with chemicals
to restore pliability. After several months of effort, nearly a third of
the film was saved onto an internegative. The part that was not able
to be uniformly salvaged was returned to Lobster in shards – some
10,000 pieces which would require the patience of a jigsaw puzzle
specialist to recombine.
In early 2000, Bromberg and Lange got their hands on a new
three-million-pixel digital camera which they used to capture the
fragmented images, which kept them busy through 2005. When
finished, they found themselves with a disjunctive masterpiece
on a hard drive, but were forced to wait for digital restoration
TOP LEFT: Tom Burton, Executive Director of Technicolor Restoration
Services in Hollywood, helmed the restoration of A Trip to the Moon at the
Technicolor laboratories in Los Angeles. (Photo:Ahmad Ouri)
TOP RIGHT: Technicians labor lovingly during restoration of A Trip to the
Moon at Technicolor labs in Los Angeles.
techniques to advance to a level suited to the sensitive task.
It was in 2010 that the heavy-lifting began for Burton and the
group at Technicolor Creative Services. As it happened, at the
time of the restoration, Technicolor was also working on Martin
Scorsese’s 2012 film, Hugo, about the life of Méliès, and the director
wound up incorporating the footage into his project, which
received 11 Academy Award nominations, earning a Visual Effects
trophy for Rob Legato.
That happy accident was a long way from Burton’s mind when
he began the restoration. “The files we received were in various
formats – TIFF, TGA, JPG – and different resolutions. Some were
captured via digital camera, frame by frame, and some were from
the digital scanner,” Burton recalls. “There was no way to play back
a continuous image, nor was the data sequentially organized.”
Using for reference an HDCAM telecine of an existing B&W print,
the individual frames and image shards were carefully mapped to
their proper locations.
From then on, it became a process of iteration. “Playing back this
timeline of newly assembled color-tinted images that no one had
had the opportunity to view for many decades – possibly a century
or more – was very exciting,” Burton says. Ensuing steps included
image stabilization – more precisely adjusting the shattered
fragments – “de-flickering,” which conformed frame-to-frame
densities, and a color pre-grade.
With this baseline look established, Technicolor set about recreating
the missing color shards and in some cases frames; about 10%
of the film had simply crumbled to dust. Carefully sampling the
original color palette, Burton’s crew copied data from the black and
white print, carefully preserving the anomalies of the hand-tinting,
which included smudging and other quirks. The reconstruction
utilized VFX tools including Digital Vision Phoenix/DVO, MTI
and After Effects.
“It’s really more a visual effects project in a way than a restoration
project,” Burton told Smithsonian magazine in 2011. “A lot of the
technology that we used to rebuild these frames is the technology
that you would use if you were making a first-run, major visual
effects motion picture. You would never have been able to pull
this off 10 years ago, and certainly not at all with analog, photochemical
technology.”
FALL 2017 VFXVOICE.COM • 65