Among the studio’s earliest feature films, long forgotten and fallen into disrepair. Decades in storage had shrunk the film and turned it acidic, warping it past what any conventional scanner could pull through. We captured every frame.
These were among the earliest feature films Paramount produced, and for many of them, the reels we received were the only copies known to exist. Later prints of a few had survived, third and fourth generation, but these were the original cut films, the source everything else had once been struck from. For several titles, if these reels were lost, nothing would be left at all.
No one had mishandled them. They were simply very old, too shrunken and brittle for any scanner then in existence. But they were too important to abandon, so the studio set them aside on a shelf reserved for exactly this: irreplaceable film no existing technology could safely digitize, kept deliberately against the day one finally could.
Film this old and this shrunken cannot be run on equipment that expects it to hold a standard size. Ours does not: it captures each frame at whatever dimensions age has left it, so reels a conventional transport could not even thread ran through cleanly and were digitized in full, without further harm to the originals.
Films classified as unscannable, transported and captured without further harm.
About a dozen early features were resurrected from material that would otherwise have been written off. The scans were delivered to the studio as new digital masters, returning a collection of its earliest filmmaking to usable, archival form and safeguarding the originals against any further loss.
