By Chris Prince
Digital Preservation (Archives) Manager
Average read time: 2 minutes
Last year we received an enquiry about a few reels of Film, that were found in the Gloucester ice-cream factory. They wanted to get the material digitised and got in touch about whether we’d be able to digitise. We have a great working partnership with ITV Content Delivery service – who specialise in digitising Video and Film contents.
As is the case with films and video, you don’t know what’s going to be on there until you sit down and watch it! Each film must go through this process, as we don’t want to digitise material that’s irrelevant or worse, not actually ours! So, we asked Gloucester, to send us the material, and we’d look at it.
To do this we used two pieces of special equipment for film: our film winding table, and our Steenbeck. The film winding table lets us wind and unwind film reels and inspect the frames of film by hand. While the Steenbeck allows playback 16mm films complete with sound. The film must be laced up by hand, which takes time, and a fair bit of practice. Splits and loose reels must also be spliced together.
But it’s always a great experience playing back a new film, often you’re viewing something which likely has not been seen for decades!
In this case, there was a fantastic short documentary on the Wall’s Gloucester factory from the 1960s, showing how the ice cream was made back then. It had to be digitised!
While there was some delay, as the rest of material that was due for digitisation had to be prepared, we asked ITV to prioritise this on our behalf and they were more than happy to oblige. The rest as they say is history.
Gloucester was able to make use of it. They showed it to the factory, and it’s now played in the reception!
The Wonder of Ice Cream
Be warned the intro has a very Jazzy soundtrack, it’s almost like a James Bond film (as much as an ice cream truck in the English countryside can be!)