BBC Attenborough Restoration Receives FOCAL Award

BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services team has been honoured with the 2013 FOCAL International Award for ‘Best Archive Restoration / Preservation Project’ for work on two David Attenborough nature documentary series, Life on Earth (1979) and Trials of Life (1990).
The project for BBC Worldwide totals 22 hours of footage across 25 episodes. Working with the 104 original rolls of 16mm A/B negatives, the films were inspected, ultrasonically cleaned and scanned at high resolution using the Scanity film scanner.
Once conformed, the timeline was graded on Nucoda Film Master before DVO Dust and Clarity was applied to automatically clean up dirt, dust and grain. Each frame was then checked manually using Diamant DustBuster+ for any defects not removed in the automatic pass. The completed digital masters were returned for final review by BBC Studios and Post Production’s colourist, Jonathan Wood, before playout to produce the HD masters.
Kevin Shaw, lead technologist at BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services, said: "We’re extremely proud to have won a FOCAL International Award for these iconic series. We worked from the best possible source by going back to the original 16mm A/B roll negatives so the remastered versions appear sharper and clearer than ever before. The footage is spectacular, and when working on it you really get a feel for the scientific importance of what was being documented.
"The original films required some meticulous restoration work, and in the later series electronic sequences had to be painstakingly reproduced including the remaking of credit sequences using new high resolution captions. The end results are amazing."
Life on Earth was the first of David Attenborough’s great surveys of life on the planet. It tells the story of the development of life on Earth; from the first single-cell organism that appeared in the seas about 3500 million years ago, to the millions of diverse and complex animals and plants that share the world with us today.
Trials of Life examines animal behaviour from birth to adulthood focusing across 12 episodes on different aspects of the journey through life, from finding food and hunting to making homes and protecting the next generation. The 1990 series is renowned for its many incredible wildlife sequences - including killer whales beaching themselves to catch sea lions, chimpanzees undertaking a brutal hunt for colobus monkeys, footage from the inside of an army ant bivouac and the amazing surge to the sea of millions of red crabs in Christmas Island.
(IT/CD)