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Topic: Is there info. about contents of each 20 min reel?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
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Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 05-08-2003 05:54 AM
Some film archives catalogue their holdings this way, providing a descriptive account of a film's narrative with reel and footage references to identify this scene. The reason for doing this is to allow researchers to identify the particular bit of a film they're interested in from the catalogue, and thus reduce the number of cans that have to be pulled up from the vault. For example, if a TV researcher was working on a documentary about Hitchcock and wanted to use a clip from the shower scene in Psycho, the archive would only have to pull out, say, reel 3, and tell the telecine operator to make a digibeta of 672-1084ft.
As a general rule, the public sector film archives will do this sort of cataloguing:
quote: R1(0) Opening Titles. (309) Fred (Joe Bloggs) appears at enters the doorway of his ex-wife's apartment block. Shortly afterwards we hear a single gunshot. Fred leaves the block by the rear entrance, making sure no-one is watching him. (752) Inside the local police station. A 'phone rings on the duty officer's desk....
Whereas TV libraries and commercial stock-shot agencies tend to use a form of cataloguing called shotlisting, because it gives users more accurate information about the content of each shot. For example:
quote: (309)GV ext. 1930s apartment block. (325) MCU Fred, lights cigarette. (337) ML apartment block entrance...
That way, if a broadcaster wanted to find stock footage of someone in a 1930s costume smoking (for example, to illustrate a documentary stating that no-one thought smoking was dangerous in the 1930s), this information would let him find it, whereas the narrative description above wouldn't. As you might have guessed, shotlisting takes a lot longer than descriptive cataloguing (which is why public archives rarely do it) and sometimes requires very specialist knowledge. For example, if you were catalouging a war propaganda film, it would help to know precisely what type of aeroplane or tank you were looking at. If a documentary maker wanted footage of a Spitfire Mk. I but not a Mk. II, you would need that information on your database in order to service the request.
You can find lots of examples of shotlist cataloguing on the British Pathé newsreel website.
I, too, can't think of any reason why a projectionist would need this sort of information, though.
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Don E. Nelson
Expert Film Handler
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Posts: 138
From: Brentwood, CA, USA
Registered: Nov 2001
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posted 05-08-2003 02:19 PM
..........well if you must know, i just hope John P. isn't listening,
I like to buy (odd) 35mm reels of features, (they are usually cheap, and I can edit out the good scenes and use the rest of the film for scene editing practice[w.o syn sound] on my upright moviola)
And yesterday I see this add on the net where this guy is selling reel 5 of the latest blockbuster. (I'd rather not give the title, .......but it is a trilogy made in Australia, and the directors first name is Peter, and it came from a famous book about little people) And I though, gee .............what happened in reel 5, 100 minutes into this 3 hour film? what part of the story were they telling, and there you have the reason for the (odd) question.
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