The Water-Damaged F.L. Roy Films Preservation Project – Part 2

Hi everyone, Bo Pickett here again to provide an update on our ambitious project to preserve a collection of water-damaged motion-picture films by local photographer and filmmaker, Frederick Lewis Roy (1881-1950). In the last blog post, we had successfully designed the treatment process necessary to thaw, disinfect, clean, dry, and rehouse the films in question, and had just begun to actually pull them from the freezer and treat them. Now, at the conclusion of the project, I’m excited to share the results, challenges, and surprises.

From April to June, the treatment of the films was executed at a rate of about four films per week. Initially, we had prepared to treat 33 reels of film, but an additional box of films was discovered in the Archives Freezer, bringing the total to 46 reels. Of these, twenty reels had not suffered any water damage, meaning their treatment could be accelerated and focus on eliminating mold which had grown on many of the reels as a result of humidity caused by the flood. Treating the remaining 26 films with water damage was a slow and careful process, since very little was known about the condition of each reel until it had been thawed from the Archives Freezer. Varying symptoms and levels of decay were anticipated, including discolouration. Then, shrinkage, warping, image loss, and—worst of all—blocking (the adhering of layers of film, preventing them from being unwound without peeling away the image). When the project began, there was an assumption that some films were going to be completely lost due to the conditions they had experienced in 2004. However, to our surprise and delight, the results were very different than expected.

The 26 reels that were treated did display many of those aforementioned symptoms of water damage, but the worst ones (image loss and blocking) were not nearly as prevalent as expected. None of the films remained blocked when they were unwound during the cleaning process, with only slight blocking present on the all-black outer edge of the films, meaning that no image was lost in that manner. While image loss did occur in some films, this was caused by water softening the photographic emulsion—which captures the actual image on the surface—to such an extent that sections of emulsion had dissolved entirely. Though this is obviously unfortunate, image loss was concentrated almost entirely to the ends of the film reels (known as the “head” and “tail”) where the emulsion was exposed to the elements. To put it into perspective, on a 400-foot reel of film, water-damage would rarely penetrate farther than the first 10 feet of the film, and even then the image loss in the affected section was rarely total. Apart from that, nearly all of the water-damaged reels showed signs of discolouration, warping, and shrinkage which were accelerated by the flood, but the image on the films had remained almost entirely intact.

By the end of June, every single reel had been successfully treated, with only minimal loss of the precious images on these films. After being rehoused into long-term archival storage canisters, they have now been incorporated into the PMA’s publicly accessible collections. However, truly preserving the films means we need to go beyond merely protecting the original material—we need to be able to view them. To that end, 13 of the 46 film reels were digitized on at the TMU Motion Picture Lab at a resolution of 2K. These scans constitute about 2,500 feet of the 11,000 feet of film in this collection and provide a wealth of insights into what exactly makes these films so special, and so exciting to share.

Speaking of sharing, while the PMA is busy developing a way to scan even more of these films and share them with the community, we’d like to share one more film to complement the previous example in Part 1 of the blog. This time, the PMA is pleased to present Winter Witcheries and Wolf Hunt. These two short films, found stored together on the same reel, provide an excellent example of how water damage can affect the image area of the film, as well as how resilient the film can be against that type of damage.

Winter Witcheries was shot in the afternoon of January 8, 1941, because Roy was interested in the hoarfrost that had accumulated on the trees beneath the Hunter Street Bridge near Quaker Oats. Wolf Hunt, meanwhile, is a more self-explanatory title, and depicts the failed efforts of the Peterboro Wolf Club between February 4-5, 1941, when they find only some beautiful scenery, animal tracks, and passing deer. Despite the damage at the head of the film, which will be obvious in the first few seconds, the rest of the film remained intact, and the colours remained vibrant and required little colour correction during the digitization process.

Winter Witcheries and Wolf Hunt are a fine addition to the PMA’s film collection, but there remains more reels to share in the future. Stay tuned for further updates, and we are looking forward to sharing what we have in store!