The Reel Thing XXII
August 21-22, 2009
Linwood Dunn Theatre
Los Angeles, CAThe Speakers
Rita Belda received her Bachelor's in Communication Studies and Film Studies at the University of Iowa. After graduating from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House in 1999, she worked as an Assistant Film Preservationist at UCLA Film and Television Archive, working primarily on silent films. In 2002, she joined Sony Pictures' Asset Management and Film Restoration department, and has since worked on the preservation, restoration, and re-mastering of Columbia Pictures and Sony Films dating from the 1920's to the present, including THE MORE THE MERRIER (1943), CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (1935), THE WAY OF THE STRONG (1928), THE STRANGE ONE (1957), CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989), and overseeing the new prints for distribution of the films of Harold Lloyd.
Bob Eicholz is the Senior Vice President - Technology and Corporate Development at EFILM, a leading digital laboratory in Hollywood, California. Bob's technical groups oversee EFILM's software, hardware, and imaging science. In addition, Bob oversees EFILM's International Expansion, and works with his colleagues at Deluxe Laboratories to encourage cooperation and collaboration between the digital and film sides of the business. Bob has worked in the industry for about 13 years, including overseeing implementation of EFILM's archiving technologies. Bob holds a Masters Degree from UCLA in Information Technology and Business Finance, and is the co-author of Digital Postproduction for (9th Edition, American Cinematographer). When not dealing with film technologies, Bob can be found wandering the back roads of Catalina Island with his family, friends, and...most importantly...his two Italian Greyhounds Sonny and Boots."
John Galt is currently the Senior Vice President of Advanced Digital Imaging at Panavision’s corporate office. His responsibilities at Panavision include the development of digital imaging technologies in support of Panavision's core motion picture and television production business.
Galt was project leader of the group that, with Panavision’s technology partner Sony, developed the “Genesis” digital cinematography camera. Prior to Genesis, Galt was also responsible for the “Panavized” version of the Sony HDW-F900 first used by George Lucas on Star Wars episode 2.
John Galt was previously employed as Vice President, High Definition Technology Development for Sony Pictures High Definition Center. His main responsibilities were the integration of electronic and film imaging systems. This included film preservation, High Definition film transfer systems and electronic cinema. Galt was project leader of the group that designed and built the first High Definition Telecine in North America.
He holds numerous U.S., British, and Japanese patents in film and electronic imaging related areas.
David is the founder and President of AudiGraphics, Inc., a firm that provides management tools to National Public Radio, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and hundreds of public radio stations nationwide. In 2005 he turned over his operational responsibilities in order to pursue his avocation for historical sound recordings. His CD reissues and liner notes have been nominated for six Grammys and won one.
He is also a principal at First Sounds, a collaboration of experts dedicated to making the earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time. First Sounds gained international attention last year when it identified mankind’s first recordings of its own voice – made two decades before Edison invented the phonograph – and played them back to an astonished world.
After graduation from Dartmouth College and a number of years there with Dartmouth College Films and The Dartmouth Film Society, Robert Gitt joined The American Film Institute in 1970, becoming its technical officer in 1973. It was at the AFI that he became involved in film preservation, with his first major project being Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon."
In 1977, Gitt joined the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where he has been responsible for the preservation or restoration of many hundreds of films, including such classic titles as "Hell's Angels," "My Man Godfrey," alternate versions of "The Big Sleep" and "My Darling Clementine," Orson Welles' "Macbeth," "Letter From an Unknown Woman," "The Night of the Hunter," and "A Man for All Seasons." He also collaborated with Richard Dayton and Pete Comandini to restore the earliest successful 2-color and 3- color Technicolor features "The Toll of the Sea," and "Becky Sharp."
After serving for 28 years as head of the UCLA Film & Television Archive preservation program, Robert Gitt retired in 2005, but continues to work on special projects in a part-time capacity. Gitt has lectured widely and his preservation work is regularly presented at The London Film Festival and other festivals and museums around the world. His 1992 AMIA lecture on motion picture sound history, entitled "A Century of Sound," is presently being transferred to DVD by the Rick Chace Foundation, with Volume One (1876-1932) already available, and Volume Two (1933-1975) currently in production. Among the honors he has received are the British Film Institute Archival Achievement Award and the Prix Jean Mitry. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Director of Library Restoration and Preservation, is a 19-year veteran with the Walt Disney Studios. He received his Masters Degree in Film Studies from Boston University in 1984, and was the teaching assistant for noted film scholar Roger Manvell. He was an active member of the New York City Projectionist's local for seven years, working at Todd-AO Studios as well as the American Museum of the Moving Image, and during that time was also a consultant for both the LucasFilm TAP Program, and Dolby Labs.
During his tenure at Disney, Theo has served as the Director of Foreign Post Production for Disney Character Voices International, and was also the Manager of Film Operations for Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. He has been involved in numerous projects ranging from Super 8 from non-theatrical use through 70mm 3D IMAX printing strategies. He served as the Technical Coordinator for the 70mm premiere of The Lion King at Radio City Music Hall, and helped mount the outdoor German premiere of Pocahontas at the Olympic Park in Munich.
He has been stewarding the Studio's Restoration Project since 2004 with the release of Bambi on DVD, and is presently coordinating the digitization of all of the Studio’s nitrate negatives. Theo also designed the syllabus for the Studio’s World Wide Post Production Operations education and training program. A member of SMPTE, BKSTS, and AMIA, Theo has also lectured and written extensively on the history of cinema technologies, including widescreen processes, Technicolor, and multi-channel stereo sound formats.
Bob has been involved in film sound preservation since 1990 when he joined Chace Productions. Chace Audio joined the Deluxe family of companies on July 1st of 2009, and Bob is the Vice President of Audio for the Division. Bob has been a member of AMIA since 1991, and is also a member of SMPTE, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and ACVL. Bob has served on the National Film Preservation Board Advisory Task Force, the Library of Congress panel for the State of American Television and Video Preservation and is currently chairing the Education, Training and Research Committee for the National Recording Preservation Board. He has spoken on film sound preservation, restoration and re-mastering at AMIA, ACVL, SMPTE and ARSC conferences. Prior to joining Chace, Bob was the Manager of Technical Operations at Warner Hollywood Studios and an award winning documentary/industrial filmmaker in Chicago, Illinois. Bob graduated from Purdue University in 1973 with a Bachelor of Arts in Radio-TV-Film.
Mo's career in negative cutting acts as a parenthesis to the many opportunities she has had in her business life. Starting as a trainee at Universal Studios in 1974 - the first film she handled was Jaws - she became proficient at negative cutting while working at Quinn Martin Productions, Paramount Television, MGM and Columbia Pictures. In 1982, she left the film world to sell residential and commercial real estate in Beverly Hills and Orange County.
In 1985, Mo turned a new page and became a production assistant for a TV commercial production company, working her way up to a producer of television spots and rock videos. The birth of her son, Logan put all of that on hold and when she was ready to rejoin the work force in 1992, she was hired as a negative cutter for Donah Bassett, who had the negative cutting accounts for Columbia-TriStar and Warner Brothers. In early 1993, Donah, who wanted to retire, offered Mo the business and it changed hands that year.
Since then, Mo has worked on hundreds of films, including the Spider-Man, Batman and Matrix series, all of Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen's films, as well as having the delightful job of living in London to cut the first two Harry Potter films. Under Mo's direction, D. Bassett and Associates was one of the first and few negative cutting companies to embrace the DI process, acquiring software from both the UK and Australia, which it continues to use as part of the DI line-up.
The process she pioneered: pulling select shots for the DI and logging and exporting the captured data to the scan facilities, has led her in another, unexpected direction - archiving film assets for Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Mo has also had the challenge in the last few years of working on the restoration of several major motion pictures, including Apocalypse Now and How the West Was Won.
Along the way, Mo has produced a few short films and has optioned the book "The Search" by Geoff Dyer, which she is attempting to produce along with her UK business partner, Annie Nightingale of the BBC.
Mo is a native of Los Angeles and one of many of the Henry family negative cutters and lab workers who span four generations.
Mike Inchalik, Chief Operating Officer at Lowry Digital Images, has spent his career at the intersection of analog and digital imaging science. He joined Kodak after earning a degree in Chemical Engineering from Bucknell University to help design new photographic films. While at Kodak he saw the potential of digital imaging and went back to school part-time, receiving his master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Rochester. Inchalik was part of the team of engineers that envisioned the need for, designed and built the very first Kodak digital film scanner during the early 1980s. He was a key member of the brain trust behind the development of the Cineon digital film system, which was quickly embraced as the defacto industry standard for digital film work. The system provided a practical capability for scanning and converting images captured on film into digital files at up to 4K resolution. It included image processing software and workstations, and a laser recorder for rendering the processed digital files back onto film. The initial application was the restoration of the classic Walt Disney animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1993. The success of that project led directly to the evolution of hybrid technologies for creating visual effects, film restoration and digital intermediate technology and workflows. Inchalik held a number of key management positions in the field of hybrid imaging at Kodak prior to joining Lowry Digital Images in 2003. While he has continued to be involved in the underlying technology of the Lowry Process™ which underpins the company’s image processing services, he now focuses his efforts on leading the company’s strategic planning, marketing and selling activities.
Nicola Mazzanti has been active in the field of film archiving and restoration for over 20 years, starting as a Film Archivist, and as a founder and director for over 10 years of the Bologna Film Festival, dedicated to film history and preservation.
As a preservationist, he founded and directed an internationally renowned film restoration laboratory, and in this capacity he is responsible for the analog or digital restorations of hundreds of silent and sound films.
He also teaches and writes about theory and practice of film archiving and restoration, and is a Member of the Technical Commission of the International Federation of Film Archives.
Currently he is an independent consultant in Europe and in the US on major projects involving the transition of traditional Film Archives to Digital technologies for preservation and access.
Ethan Miller is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is the Associate Director of the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC). He is also a co-founder of Pergamum Systems, a startup building more efficient, easier to manage archival storage systems. Dr. Miller received a PhD from UC Berkeley in 1995, and has been on the UC Santa Cruz faculty since 2000. He the author of over 100 papers on a wide range of topics in file and storage systems, distributed systems, and information retrieval. His current research projects, which are funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and industry support for the SSRC, include long-term archival storage systems, scalable indexing and metadata for non-hierarchical file systems, file systems for non-volatile RAM technologies, and security and reliability in storage systems. Dr. Miller's broader interests include file systems, parallel and distributed systems, operating systems, and computer security. In addition to research and teaching in storage systems and operating systems, Prof. Miller has worked with industry to help move research results into commercial use at companies such as LSI, Symantec and NetApp. Further information on Dr. Miller is available at www.cs.ucsc.edu/~elm/.
Michael Pogorzelski received his Bachelor's and Master of Arts degrees in Film Studies (Communication Arts) at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He began his career at the Academy Film Archive in 1996 and was named Director of the Archive in 2000. He has supervised and co-supervised the restoration and preservation of documentaries, experimental films, animated films as well as five Academy Award Best Picture winners. Most recently, he co-supervised the digital restoration of DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK (1939), LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945), THE ROBE (1953) and Akira Kurosawa's RASHOMON (1950).
John Polito has been at the forefront of digital sound restoration since its inception. After graduating in 1987 from Stanford University with honors in Music Composition and Digital Signal Processing, John joined Sonic Solutions and helped define the field by assisting in the development of the first digital audio workstation for sound restoration. In 1991 he started Audio Mechanics, which is one of the premier sound restoration facilities.
Ned is currently Vice President, Mastering, Warner Bros. Technical Operations, responsible for overseeing the audio and visual restoration and preservation of the more than 6,500 films and tens of thousands of television programming in the Warner Bros. library using the latest in restoration technology, including many techniques that have been developed by Warner Bros. Technical Operations.
Among the 1,600 films that Price has worked on for the Studio are “King Kong,” “Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Gone with the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Searchers,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “2001” and “Bonnie and Clyde.”
Price first joined Warner Bros. in 1990 as Manager, Mastering. Previously he worked for MGM/UA
Price was awarded the Cinema Audio Society’s President’s Award in 2004 in recognition of his work on the preservation and restoration of the soundtracks of Stanley Kubrick’s films.
Price graduated from the Syracuse University Newhouse School with a BA in Film Production. He is headquartered in Burbank.
Ralph Sargent has been involved in preservation for over 40 years, first teaching at UCLA in the 1960’s. He formed Film Technology Company in 1971, a film laboratory specializing in preservation and restoration of film, but also including video and audio. Their clients include all the studios, UCLA film and television archive, MoMA and other archives. Ralph is also the author of “Preserving the Moving Image”, published in 1974.
Alan Stark is currently Vice President at Film Technology Company, Inc. in Los Angeles. Alan brings to his current position 35 plus years of experience in management and operation of motion picture, video and instructional media facilities. Ten years as an Instructional Media Specialist for the Los Angeles Community College District and four years in Educational Design and Marketing of instructional media materials for Baxter Pharmaceuticals preceded Alan's current work at Film Technology Company.
Alan has co-produced a variety of radio programs, LP's, CD's and video cassettes, all of which center around vintage films or vintage film music. Alan is a charter and lifetime member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. He has served on various committees within the organization and currently is on the Executive Board as Treasurer. Alan’s interest music and desire to further the goals of AMIA is why he is providing a live musical accompaniment for the screening of The Way of the Strong at this August 2009 Reel Thing.
Mrs. Stratton is Senior Industrial Hygienist for Citadel and acts as a project team manager. Her roles at Citadel include consulting and project management related to industrial hygiene and indoor air quality, chemical exposure, office and industrial ergonomics, employee safety, and environmental management. In addition, she is spearheading the dynamic Citadel E-Learning System – a web-based, electronic health & safety training and records keeping program. Ms. Stratton also serves as Health and Safety Manager developing, evaluating, and implementing occupational safety and compliance programs company-wide. She is currently in the application process to sit for the Certified Safety Professional (CSP) and the Certified Professional Ergonomist (CPE) certification exams.
Ms. Stratton entered the environmental health and industrial hygiene field in 2000 as a Safety Specialist for the University of Southern California where she managed the University Ergonomics program and assisted with occupational safety training, building safety and indoor air quality related projects. Mrs. Stratton then spent several years in the corporate environment managing environmental and occupational safety programs. As a Safety Specialist for Cardinal Health she was responsible for federal and local compliance by managing safety programs for 180+ nuclear pharmacy locations nationwide. As Regional Corporate Safety Manager for Countrywide Financial Corporation she implemented and maintained ergonomic, safety, and environmental compliance programs affecting thirteen locations and 10,000+ employees. Responsibilities included ergonomic evaluations, monthly and quarterly safety training courses delivered to the Facilities Department and general employee populations, quarterly building fire-life-safety audits, and incident response/accident investigation of employee injuries.
Ms. Stratton is currently working on the development and implementation of a comprehensive health and safety agenda for a large Los Angeles-based company. The project scope includes written program development (IIPP, Hot Work, PPE, and more), environmental compliance consulting, fire-life-safety facility audits, job hazard analysis, on-site employee certification training (Forklift and AWP), and a custom-tailored Citadel E-Learning curriculum. Another current project includes development of a custom-tailored Citadel E-Learning curriculum for a major motion picture studio to provide regulatory compliance training to off-site production personnel at satellite locations throughout Southern California.
Al Sturm is currently President of Wide Band Video Labs, a company in San Jose, Ca., a custom video design laboratory responsible for development of digital and analog prototype and pre-production systems. Previously, he was Director of Engineering at Merlin Engineering in Palo Alto, where he managed the development of High Band signal systems for modification of Ampex and Bosch broadcast video recorders. He was also involved in engineering consulting for the design of a High Band VTR for smaller TV operations. At Ampex Corporation, he was Field engineer for the installation, training and maintenance of broadcast video recorders.
Projects and clients he has been involved with include:
SYKCORP - Demodulator, Scan Converter, Video processor for an Ampex FR900 to recover video from the Apollo 11 Lunar Orbiter tapes; FILM TECHNOLOGY COMPANY - Equipment related to variable gamma printing of 35mm and 16mm archival films; INTEL Inc. - Design and test of a computer controlled automatic video parameter tester for the X-BOX game console; LOCKEED CORP. - Analog input Ram based Digital recorder for use in analysis of satellite video; IVC, Inc. - High Definition 24 frame film-to-1080I 30 frame rate converter; INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS - 525 OR 625 serial digital in and out broadcast video data encoder; IVT MEDICAL - A S-VHS multi-std digital TBC (1023, 1049, 525, 1249, 625 line STDs); LASER-DUB - A twice speed modified laser-disc master head end, with digital processing for a high speed VHS dubbing system (Patent issued) USP # 5,260,800; MERLIN ENGINEERING - Wide Band (10 MHz) 1" BCN vtr modifications. High band fm signal system for modification of older broadcast video tape recorders; SATCORP, Inc. - A 12 MHz analog bandwidth Component 1" BCN fm signal system and digital TBC; WALT DISNEY IMAGINEERING - Very wideband RGB graphics coaxial distribution amp.
The Reel Thing Technical Symposium is organized and coordinated
by Grover Crisp and Michael Friend
