VTR Group gets into the festival spirit

VTR and TMR, part of VTR Group, have completed postproduction on Julien Temple’s ‘Glastonbury’.
The film documents the story of three decades of the world’s biggest and longest-running festival and comprises of 33 years of personal testimonies on hand-held cameras, super-8 reels, video diaries and 35mm footage. Glastonbury, which was shown at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals earlier this year, will hit UK cinemas on 14 April.
TMR and VTR handled restoration, telecine, titles and effects work for the project. TMR’s Simon Duke (aka Spike) completed full restoration on the archive footage by running sections of footage through the Teranex to remove sparkle.
“Only some of the sections allowed me to do this as part of the footage was from 8mm film,” explained Spike. “Due to the speed that it was scanned at, the dirt was on two fields so the Teranex ignored the dirt thinking that it is supposed to be there.” The remaining sections where then loaded into the MTI where Spike manually removed the dirt.
It was then sent over to VTR colourist Tom Russell to grade the film in Specter. Russel spent around two weeks working on the footage to create a unified look.
“The main technical challenge involved creating a seamless look using an assortment of footage from 1972 to 2005,” explained Russel. “Having been sourced from professional BBC news footage and festival goer’s amateur home videos we had every tape format ranging from HD, 35mm, 16mm mini DV to VHS.
“The great thing about the film is that it not only reminisces about people’s experiences but covers the political elements concerning travellers and why people go to Glastonbury.”
The film’s titles and effects work were created in Smoke by VTR’s Alan Maiden.
“Key to the success of this movie was making sure that we kept a consistent look whilst jumping between the decades and creating a nostalgic and earthy feel. VTR did this brilliantly,” said Temple.
“The team at the VTR Group have been extremely flexible and gone way beyond the call of duty,” explained Robert Richards, Producer. “VTR is the only place to go for post, there’s a great atmosphere and the staff have a can do attitude.”
The work on Glastonbury follows on the back of a number of large feature projects completed by Digital Cinema at VTR. These include ‘Keeping Mum’, ‘Vera Drake’, ‘Rag Tale’ and ‘Upside of Anger’.
(GB)