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CW Journal
: Summer 04 : Remastering a Masterwork: Restoration of 'The Patriot'
"Basically, anything
that could have been wrong with the film was wrong with it," Jerry Pooler said. He helped develop software at CineSite that allowed combining
elements from different pieces of the original.
Click image to enlarge |
The Patriot Theaters in Colonial Williamsburg's Visitor
Center were built to show one film and one film only: Williamsburg—The Story of a Patriot. And they have been showing it continuously since 1957.
Filmed in wide-screen VistaVision, with six-track stereo sound, the movie has
introduced Colonial Williamsburg to more than thirty million theater viewers.
Click image to enlarge |
Restoration of The Patriot
by Richard L. McCluney Jr.
He bragged about the film all the way from Washington,
D.C., to Colonial Williamsburg. He told his son that the color and clarity of
the VistaVision movie would open a window on the past. A skeptical thirteen-year-old,
the youngster would see for himself. They sat in a darkened Visitor Center
theater, and sounds filled the room. Williamsburg—The Story of a Patriot began. A minute or two later the
son gave his father a look that fathers of teenagers know well. A look that
says, "Oh, Dad. Please."
The color, the sharpness, and
clarity that had made such an impression when his father saw the film in 1958,
a year after it premiered, were gone. Dad was disappointed. Worse, he had
disappointed his son. The movie showed its age, nearly forty at the time. The
colors had faded; the film was grainy and, well, fuzzy. The Patriot, as the motion picture is commonly called, was a
shadow of its former greatness.
The longest-running motion picture
ever, for forty-seven years The Patriot has
introduced guests to Williamsburg and America on the eve of the Revolution. It
shows the people of eighteenth-century Williamsburg as they might have been,
introduces characters that made the nation, helps audiences understand the
issues that divided colonists from one other and from the mother country. It
looks down a vista of the past. A vista made possible by John D. Rockefeller
Jr.'s restoration of the town, and Hollywood and history's best collaboration.
By the 1990s, The Patriot had to
be restored or abandoned. It was that serious.
The father was not a person to
simply say to his son, "Well, you should have seen it before." He was Robert A.
Harris, president of the Film Preserve, a New York company that had a hand in
restoring Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus,
and My Fair Lady. He went looking for whoever was responsible for The
Patriot, and that brought him to me. Harris
and I talked for hours.
It was 1995.
The Patriot is an elite motion picture production. The director,
writers, cast, and crew were among Hollywood's best multiple Academy Award
winners, under the direction of George Seaton. For sets they had the $60
million-plus resuscitation of Williamsburg and two well-preserved historic
Virginia plantations. The filmmakers took as much pride in the work as they did
in the most important theatrical releases. Maybe more.
When it premiered in March of
1957, The Patriot was one of the most
technologically advanced films, one of a few motion pictures, and the only
nontheatrical film, photographed in VistaVision, an ultrawide screen, big movie
format. It was shot to be screened in twin theaters—the Patriot
Theaters—designed for it and for
no other movie.
The VistaVision frames of The Patriot contain three times the information of a regular 35 mm
image. Each of the film's 52,000 frames had to be worked on to produce the
final restoration.
Click image to enlarge |
Robert Harris of the Film Preserve in New York found Eastman Kodak's CineSite in Hollywood to do the job.
Click image to enlarge |
Monty Phillips, lead artist, above, and Valerie McMahon, compositor, below, worked on The Patriot at CineSite's offices.
Click image to enlarge |
Click image to enlarge |
By 1990, The Patriot had run afoul of a problem that was threatening many
color films made from 1955 to 1960. It
had been made on an Eastman Kodak color negative film that recorded the
spectrum of tints, hues, and shades by exposing three layers in the stock. One
was magenta, a kind of red; the second, cyan, a kind of blue-green; and the third
was yellow. Together these layers produced the magnificent colors that The
Patriot shared with the blockbusters of its
day.
The colors had faded, especially
the yellow die. Nearly all of the information stored in that layer was lost.
Harris: "Because of the yellow fading, blacks go blue, highlights go dull blue,
faces go crustacean, which is wonderful if you're a lobster. The film loses
contrast and contrast controls sharpness.
"Overall the image was ugly, and
not acceptable."
For the most important films,
separation masters—three black and white prints—were made. Each includes the
information from a single color layer of the original. Normally, if the
original negative was damaged or faded, one could turn to them. Under ideal
circumstances a new negative using the information from all three separation
masters would closely approximate the original. Fortunately, the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation had produced separation masters for The Patriot. Unfortunately, the clear plastic base material for
these masters had begun to shrink. And they didn't shrink evenly. That meant
the three color images didn't register, or line up. Prints made from them would
be distorted. The color would be questionable, with increased grain and
decreased sharpness.
Also not acceptable. This was what
Harris and his son and all of Colonial Williamsburg's guests were seeing by
1995.
In 1995, an attempt was made to
create a new negative using conventional film restoration technology. The old
shrunken, brittle film elements were used to make just one duplicate negative.
The demise of The Patriot had been
postponed.
But only postponed.
The film elements used to create
the internegative had been damaged beyond repair. New copies of The Patriot would have to come from another source.
Enter the digital age.
Since computers had become an
integral part of filmmaking, I hoped that the salvation and restoration of The
Patriot might be accomplished
electronically. In 1995 the technology wasn't available. By 2001 it was. It
seemed that it might be possible to restore The Patriot for the next generation of Williamsburg visitors.
The Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation began raising the funds the project required. Major support was
provided by Royce R. and Kathryn M. Baker; Marcia and John R. Donnell Jr.; the
Joullian Foundation, Inc.; Letitia and Edward C. Joullian; Ruth H. and James H.
Keene III; Gretchen B. and William R. Kimball; Virginialee and Edward Lynch;
Abby and George O'Neill; Lois and Dick Vieser; and Bob and Marion Wilson.
Other contributors included Dr.
William A. and Patricia L. Chantry; Kenneth R. Hunt; myself; Laura C. Miller;
Charlotte M. Morehouse; Judy E. Morse; Brigit and David S. Wilson; Kenneth M.
and Sally P. Wolfe; and Louise G. and Gordon S. Wood.
Harris was engaged to supervise the
restoration and began searching for the people who could do the work.
He found them at CineSite, a Kodak company with offices in
Hollywood and London which had just worked on the digital restoration of parts
of Disney's Snow White and Fantasia. Restoring The Patriot would prove more demanding. Digital film restoration
is an emerging craft that combines the power of massive computers with the
skill of artists. At best the work is painstaking. Each color layer of each
film frame must be scanned into the computer at the highest resolution
possible, cleaned, and color corrected by eye. All the frames must match each
other so the film doesn't look like a patchwork of colors when it's
reassembled. It's a difficult, time-consuming task when the original film is in
good condition. The Patriot was
in not in good condition. It would take an extraordinary effort to restore.
Normally, the digital scans are
made from the original camera negative. They tried, but according to Jerry
Pooler of CineSite, the results were unacceptable. Yellow die failure. Pooler:
"The original negative, the yellow layer, had collapsed, had actually become
black. There was a little bit of information in there, but when you combined it
with the red and green channels, it produced a yellow-looking piece of film
which is not acceptable."
The separations would not produce
an acceptable image either.
Harris: "The film preservation
elements, the separation master, holds one third of the spectrum of light on
separate black and white prints. Those had been damaged. They had shrunken,
they had what was called differential shrinkage, and those would no longer fit
together. So basically anything that could have been wrong with the film was
wrong with it."
Jerry Pooler helped develop software at CineSite that allowed combining
elements from different pieces of the original. The Patriot was made
by some of Hollywood's best professionals in the 1950s. In the twenty-first
century, it returned to Hollywood for its restoration.
Click image to enlarge |
Corinne Pooler was manager at CineSite of the digital restoration.
Click image to enlarge |
Audio consultant Michael
Frondelli, right, Richard McCluney of Colonial Williamsburg, and Robert Harris
meet.
Click image to enlarge |
Harris and the CineSite wizards
devised a plan. They would take the digital data from each of the elements and
merge that data into a coherent and pleasing version of the film. Harris: "The
challenge was to find a way to put these disparate elements together and coming
close to what the film looked like in 1957."
It meant a tremendous amount of
work ...and a gigantic data storage system. Harris and CineSite scanned The
Patriot's original negative for the
computer. Then they scanned the best material from the three separations. Frame
by frame. There are more than 52,000 frames in the film. Huge frames. Remember The
Patriot was made in VistaVision, a format
in which there is about three times the data per frame as on a standard motion
picture frame. Each frame translates to more than 100 megabytes of data. There
are twenty-four frames to a second. If you're burning CDs at home you can get
six frames on one. A quarter of a second. To store all of the elements needed
to restore The Patriot takes about 21,000 CDs. And that was just for
backup.
Online storage required more. More
than half of CineSite's capacity. Enough to fill up every computer on your
street, your neighborhood, maybe your town. Andrew Bonello, image-processing
developer at CineSite: "It was a huge resource management project. To give you
an idea, we've scanned about 142,000 frames of film onto our data service here
and that takes up about fourteen terabytes of data, which is roughly equivalent
to about seven features according to our normal pipeline. So the data
requirements for this film, even though it is shorter than a feature film, have
been pretty high."
Now the real film restoration work
began. Every frame was examined on a computer, and cleaned of dust and dirt.
Scratches were removed and the colors corrected with sophisticated paint programs.
CineSite artists spent months with a few feet of film. They lived with John
Fry, the central figure of The Patriot, and his family, with the heroes of the American
Revolution, and with Williamsburg. They worked on images alone. Not the
soundtracks. They developed a passion for The Patriot without ever really experiencing it.
They did an enormous amount of
testing to determine the best combinations of elements they would use to
reconstruct each scene. Meanwhile, they created software tools that would help
them recombine the data from the frames.
One of the tools was critical.
Pooler: "It gives us the freedom to use different elements at will. If we find
that there's a cyan layer in one negative and a magenta layer in another
negative, there's scratches in one layer. We can go to a negative that doesn't
have the scratches in it and pull that layer up. We can recombine with
separations ...we can come up with a good-looking end product that was never
before possible."
CineSite created other tools,
including software that lets the computers register the separation elements
automatically. Pooler: "When you get two pieces of film that were created at
different times, on different cameras, with different movements, stored
differently, you get different shrinkage rates. Photochemically you can blindly
put them back together again, and they may or may not line up. Registration is
a major problem. We can take two, three, or four different elements, put them
back together again, and put them into exact registration automatically....
We can mix and match, if you will, the elements that we want to use, to get the
best-looking output. The best-looking color."
The motion picture industry will
benefit from The Patriot project. The tools and techniques developed will
save other great films.
Brad Reinke, CineSite restoration
manager: "Every time we do a project there's always new tools created that we
implement and move forward on new projects. Williamsburg is wonderful in that
we have actually built three to four new tools that we hope to use on future
projects."
Harris: "What we've accomplished
with CineSite means the industry and film restoration" have "the ability to
work with disparate records, disparate elements, and different layers of film,
put them together in different ways, control them in different ways, control
the grain, control the contrast, make things fit together that basically were
never meant to fit together. And come out the other side with a element that's
quite representative of what the film looked like almost fifty years before."
The restored Williamsburg—The Story of a Patriot is not an exact duplicate of the original. The
original was too far gone for that. It is the best approximation possible. It
will look as much like the original as I and Harris, and the people at CineSite
and Eastman Kodak, and many more can make it.
The Patriot has played to more than thirty million guests in the
Patriot Theaters. With the new negatives it can play to thirty million more
after it premiers later in 2004 at the revitalized Patriot Theaters. For home
viewing, we're producing an enhanced DVD version of the film.
Harris: "The film is important for
many reasons. Number one, it's the longest running film in motion picture
history, constantly running since 1957. Number two, it's the only film that was
ever shot in VistaVision eight perforation, horizontal, real VistaVision to be
run large format, with six tracks of stereo sound. And it's an artifact of the
period of the fifties which tried to explain what Williamsburg was all about to
the audience. And it worked. It just worked as a film."
Colonial Williamsburg is all about
historic preservation, restoration, and education. Its iconic buildings stand
as testament to the institution's success and expertise. Colonial Williamsburg
pioneered historical interpretations and innovations in personalizing history.
And Colonial Williamsburg was the first outdoor historical museum to employ the
power of sound and the moving picture to tell its story.
Williamsburg—The Story of a
Patriot is a symbol of dramatic history
telling, and a milestone in the history of motion pictures. Forty-seven years
after it was produced it has helped set new standards for film restoration. Now
and forever, audiences will be able to revel in the color and sounds of
eighteenth-century Williamsburg. The next time Harris brings his son to watch The Patriot
he will see what his father saw that first time in 1958:
"An image that was like looking
through an open window to the past. It was just so visually stunning and
brilliant that it left an impact on me forever."
How The Patriot Was Restored: Three color layers in film—cyan, magenta, and yellow—act as
filters to control red, blue, and green light and combine to produce the full-color image on the screen.
In the old negative, the yellow layer had faded, leaving almost no blue information. The magenta layer controls green information, and the cyan layer controls red information. With new digital technology and computer enhancement of the
old color separation, Kodak's Cinesite created a new yellow layer. Before restoration, the old frames from the film had unacceptable color, contrast, and resolution. A nearly perfect restoration of The Patriot was
the result of digital restoration of the three color layers and removal of scratches, dust, and dirt.
Click image to enlarge |
 Succinct Script Yields Memorable Quotes.
Read a sidebar about a dilemma with the script and view video clips of favorite lines from the film.
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 See how the color layers of the film interact with each other in this Flash movie.
Click image to play |
Richard L. McCluney Jr. is Colonial Williamsburg's Royce R. and Kathryn M. Baker vice
president for productions, publications, and learning ventures.
"Williamsburg, The Story of a Patriot" DVD $24.95
Now available in Colonial Williamsburg retail stores and online through www.williamsburgmarketplace.com
For further reading:
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Historic Triangle