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If half of a film falls off a core and you are left with two chunks of unspooling film, is there any easier way of getting them back together apart from having to manually untwist the film hundreds of times as you hand-wind it back on to the core? Asking for a friend, sort of...
Thanks!
If the film is being handed properly, the core would be in a split reel, and the reel could be handled/worked-with safely like any other reel of film. If half the film is on the floor, you are correct that recovering it to a reel(s) is a slow careful manual process to prevent any further damage. Working with film on a bare core, other than possibly a trailer, always has the possibility of becoming big mess with unnecessary film damage.
If you still have a donut of film, put it on a flat board or plate of some kind and unwind it like you were unspooling it from a platter.
Get some kind of lazy Suzan device like a revolving spice rack that you might use in your kitchen cupboard to use as a pivot.
Carefully cut the film to separate it into manageable sections if you have to. This is obviously a last resort because you will be left with a splice in your film. You’ll have to decide which is the lesser of two evils…. Scratched and damaged film or a few splices.
Just don't miss-thread it going onto the take up deck of your shiny new platter. B Ut if it does happen you can use the shop vac as I am doing in the second picture to suck it all back up.
And yes, the manager got fired for doing this.
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If you're left with two rolls of film, one still attached to the core, the other not, then there is no quick trick that will both get the film back into one roll, and avoid the need to cut and splice it.
However, if the core falls out of a roll which is otherwise intact, there is ... as long as the core in question is not a 2" one. In one of the very early practical classes I attended in film archiving school, I was told that 2" cores are the work of Satan, and that if I should ever find any in any film handling workplace I find myself in, that I should throw all of them except one in the trash immediately. That one is for rescue operations.
The reason why is that if a 3" or 4" core falls out of a reel, you can, if you are careful, place the coreless reel on a motorized flatbed, place a smaller core on the spindle, and then gently run the motor such that the film winds itself around the new core, thereby mounting the reel again. But if the reel was on a 2" core to start with, you're buggered.
While working as an assistant cameraman some years back, I had the core drop out of a 1000ft roll of exposed film while unloading a magazine. The take-up in the camera was sluggish I guess. At first I was trying to deal with it in the changing bag, but there wasn't much room to work.in the bag. We were on location, but fortunately, we found a darkroom which made things a bit easier - but I still had to do it 'by feel' in total darkness. In the end, to avoid unnecessary handling and potential damage to the scenes that were shot, we decided it was best just to cut the roll into two sections, and package it in two separate cans and let the film lab deal with it. Luckily, the spot where I pretty much randomly cut the film was in a 'bad take" so we didn't loose any important footage.
Yep, that's about right! Thanks for the responses people, "my friend" is feeling a lot better about things now. It was a long slow process, resisting the temptation to cut the film until that decision was made for us so a few frames were lost here and there. The film is silent so it could be worse. Thankfully we have an intact copy of the same film with sound.
The only time I've ever seen a made-up platter roll disintegrate was while working in a two-screen arthouse in south-west England in the 1990s. It was an Indian movie called The Square Circle. In those days, pretty much every foot of release print that came out of a Bollywood lab was acetate and Photogarded, making the resulting footage almost as thick as nitrate and able to store as much static charge as a Tesla battery every time it was wound. And, of course, impossible to wind tightly. We'd played quite a few Indian films by that time, which had led me to the conclusion that attempting to move one as a made-up platter roll was simply too risky. Only once did I have to move one between screens, and on that occasion I broke it down onto 6K reels to do so, even though the two ST-200s were only about 10 feet apart.
One Saturday evening I took over from my boss (a nice guy, but with a tendency to cut corners) at 6pm for the late shift, as I always did. I found him having just built up The Square Circle onto an unused deck on Screen 1's platter. It had to play in 2 the following afternoon. I explained my reluctance to move Indian prints as complete features, even on a board. My boss replied that if I wanted to be a wuss, he would move it for me. He did, and around 15,000 feet fell into a tangled mess on the floor, the moment he took the weight of it.
I couldn't resist. "Well it isn't a circle anymore, is it?"
It took both of us until well after midnight to recover it, having to make around 10-15 cuts in the middle of reels in the process. Incredibly, when it actually played, it looked no worse than any other "used but OK" mainstream release print. Photogard destroys film in the long term, but in the short term it certainly does what it says on the tin.
The reason why is that if a 3" or 4" core falls out of a reel, you can, if you are careful, place the coreless reel on a motorized flatbed, place a smaller core on the spindle, and then gently run the motor such that the film winds itself around the new core, thereby mounting the reel again. But if the reel was on a 2" core to start with, you're buggered.
Not really, I've used a 1 inch core with success for this. The thing you did forget to mention though is that to prevent film cinch scratching damage, you need to hold two fingers on opposite sides of the original roll so that the film has to pull past the squish of your fingers one lap at a time onto the smaller core.
A simpler solution is if Nigel has a turntable such as a Technics with a totally free-spinning platter. If so, you can lay the center of the film on the record platter and then carefully lay the outer donut of film as much around as possible (part of it will lay on the top edge. Set this turntable next to a motorized rewind bench and slowly turn the rewind table on, never getting too much speed going. Guide the film with your hands from the outer edge of the roll and onto the reel. Because the turntable will spin effortlessly, once you get down to the final laps of film where the center fell out, you can stop the rewind table and do a few flips of the center core of film and then you have a trailer-sized roll of film on a core to finish winding onto the reel without ever making a cut.
It took both of us until well after midnight to recover it, having to make around 10-15 cuts in the middle of reels in the process. Incredibly, when it actually played, it looked no worse than any other "used but OK" mainstream release print.
For the newbies, anyone ever having to deal with this sort of thing where there is simply no other alternative than to physically make a cut in the film, ALWAYS find a camera cut and cut it there on the frameline using the splicer's cutter. It will be far less obnoxious upon viewing later.
I remember having to deal with a platter wrap on a busy Saturday night where I had to cut the film in order to get the movie going again. There was some scuffed up film but only about two feet of film was actually damaged badly enough to be unusable.
I remembered the movie well enough that I knew how the scene where the film was damaged was progressing. There was a quick cutaway shot to a closeup of a computer screen and that was the spot where the film had been ruined.
I looked back on the film to the spot where the cutaway shot began then forward to where it ended and made my cuts at those points. When the film was spliced back together, a viewer who hadn't seen the movie before would never know that those five seconds of film were missing.
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