Blue Projects Win At 2009 FOCAL International Awards

Post-production company, blue, a part of the Prime Focus Group, has been honoured for their contribution to two award winning projects at the 2009 FOCAL International Awards, which celebrates the use of footage archive images in the creative media.
The restoration of Kinora reels from circa 1911 for The R&A and IMG Media Archive, collected the award for Archive Restoration or Preservation Project, beating stiff competition from the BFI who were nominated for the restoration of the David Lean collection of feature films. Also among the winners was the intro film for Jay-Z's headline set at last year’s Glastonbury Festival, which was produced by Princess Productions and post-produced by blue. The film picked up the Best Use of Footage in a Short Production award. blue would like to congratulate all involved with these two outstanding projects.
The Kinora reels, which were restored digitally, frame-by-frame at blue, feature some of the earliest recorded forms of golf instruction and were restored by blue for the R&A Archive. For the restoration process, a special rig with a rostrum camera was specially designed by blue's David Atkinson to hold the Kinora reel safely. Each individual slide of each reel was then digitally photographed at high resolution.
These photographs were treated as frames of video and arranged into the correct order to produce approximately 30 seconds of footage for each reel. The images then went through the painstaking processes of stabilisation and frame-by-frame digital restoration. This restoration project has made it possible for the public to view these reels with a pictorial quality never before seen.
The Best Use of Footage in a Short Production Award went to the Jay-Z intro film for his headline set at Glastonbury.
Directed by Ben Caron, the intro was a mixture of newsreel footage and specially shot material, including soundbites from fellow rapper Pharrell Williams. The intro, which gained worldwide attention following the success of Jay-Z’s set, was post produced at blue.
The FOCAL International Awards 2009, in association with AP Archive, were held at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel and were presented by Lord David Puttnam CBE who is FOCAL International's Chair of Patrons.
(KMcA/BMcC)