Greenpark Images
Based near Launceston, Greenpark Images has an illustrious history.
One of the UK’s largest film and video archives, the company was first set up in Polperro before relocating to London in 1939 and, through a series of circumstances, moving back to Cornwall in the late 1990’s. The archive, which is recognised as including the best audio-visual history of British social life 1940-1970, licenses the film footage for use by production companies and broadcasters worldwide.
Greenpark Images has several million feet of 35mm and 16mm film footage, dating from the 1940’s onwards, and the company is currently in the expensive process of digitising the images, as nowadays the material needs to be digitised in order to be usable.
Director of Business Development, Brian Norris, says: “We are severely restricted by the bandwidth available to us. When we receive an enquiry from a production researcher in London as to whether we have film footage on a particular theme, we would ideally want to send preview material via video streaming over the web straightway. However, our broadband connection could not sustain that so instead we have to send both the preview footage and any film they may subsequently request on DVD by courier. This increases the risk that they may decide to select footage from another archive in the meantime as production researchers are invariably up against tight deadlines.”
The UK Government has recently awarded significant multi-million pound funding through the British Film Institute, to be used to digitise the films in the National Archive and small film archives around the UK.
Brian says: “These films are part of our national heritage and it is imperative that they are digitised so that they can be carried forward for educational and cultural enjoyment into the future.
“‘Digital media has been identified as a growth area for Cornwall under the Convergence programme and archives can play an important part in the development of the market. We are working closely with South West Screen, University College Falmouth and others to set up an International Centre of Excellence for Digital Archiving in Cornwall. If there were an improved broadband infrastructure in Cornwall, it would make this considerably easier.”
Brian continues: “We have a database on our website that is searchable by keywords. However, we do not currently have examples of any previews of film clips on the website and this is something we would like to add.
It is harder than people realise to develop the database of keywords for the various shot lists as only people who have an in-depth understanding of the era are able to identify various personalities and items correctly and thus be able to define the keywords. We are currently only half way through shot-listing our archives and in order to achieve a comprehensive database of shots, searchable by keywords, we would like to create a network of home-based workers including, for example, retired people. However, again this is dependent on an upgraded broadband infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of film footage around the network.”
Brian says: “In future we would like to be able to put digitised DVDs on the website with a download facility as well as creating a web based ‘on demand’ TV service. Such a service would be likely to have strong appeal to the growing demographic of people in their 50’s, 60s and 70s, who want to ‘hark back to the past’.
“We see development of IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) as a major creative opportunity and one that we would like to be able to embrace. With the support of MLA South West we are currently embarking on the production of educational courseware for the schools’ ‘Citizenship’ programme, using footage from the archives. This is our first step into digital educational courseware and we are very excited by the opportunities this presents.
“Through broadband, opportunities are now opening up for development of content for ‘TV on demand’ and with our extensive archives, we should be well placed to take advantage of this, if only we had access to higher bandwidth. Working in co-operation with other film production specialists, or with production companies through joint ventures, our archives are potentially a goldmine. However, we are dependent on higher broadband speeds to unlock that potential.
