Cited Work |
Kinora - The Royal & Ancient Golf Club (early 1900s) |
| Restoration work commissioned by |
TWI Sport - The R&A Archive |
Duration |
25 seconds x 6 = 2.5 minutes |
First Shown since Restoration |
Open Championship Golf
- 15th July 2004 |
Project |
The project for The R&A was to restore, preserve and animate a collection of unique archive footage of golfing legends Harry Vardon, JH Taylor and James Braid, which dated back to the early 1900s. The only available footage was held on Kinora film drums as the original negatives are thought to have been lost when the Kinora factory burned down in 1914. Despite its deteriorating condition, The R&A was keen to preserve the footage by transferring it to a future-proof medium.
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Reasons for Submission |
TMR designed an innovative motion rig to enable the restoration, animation and preservation of some never-seen-before archive footage held on 100-year old Kinora film drums. The motion rig has been used for a major restoration project for The R&A.
The rig is the result of a year’s worth of product development based on a design by TMR’s archive specialist David Atkinson. It holds the Kinora reels securely and ensures that the cracked, curled and faded frames are not damaged any further during the scanning and digitisation process. Making the process more complex is the fact that Kinora footage is made up of flip-card photographs rather than celluloid. This was a major undertaking as this has never before been achieved. TMR’s precision engineer painstakingly crafted the rig from my initial design and pulled together a solution that meant this unique footage could be accurately scanned and digitally restored. The entire development process took almost a year before TMR were able to scan the first frames, confident in the knowledge that the irreplaceable pictures would not be harmed in any way. Using the specially made rig, TMR digitally scanned each frame and saved it at high resolution to ensure the best possible quality. The frames were then burned to a DVD disk as uncompressed data files so that no information was lost. From there the material was imported into the company’s Smoke system for repair, clean up, stabilisation and animation of the 600 or so frames from the first Kinora reel. Once restored, the frames were preserved onto 35mm polyester negative film for long-term archive storage. Video copies in high definition; Digi-beta and DVD formats were also produced for access purposes. TMR’s success in restoring the Harry Vardon footage resulted in The R&A asking the facility to restore and animate five other Kinora reels - including rare footage of the two other members of the famous golfing trio JH Taylor and James Braid. TMR spent over 250 hours preserving this historical footage for The R&A. |
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This facility available to FOCAL Members only. Email: info@focalint.org for your unique Password. |
| JURY COMMENTS |
An amazing achievement is TMR’s pioneering work with the Kinora film drums, entailing recreating lost film scenes from Kinora still frames designed for “flip card “ use, and requiring the construction of an entirely original rig to perform the task of stabilisation and copying. The exercise has both delivered film masters for long-term preservation and also allows us to view moving images of these early golfers for the first time. We also thought it an ’honest’ digital restoration, in that it does not attempt to clean up the image to the point where it is too different from the original. As one juror remarked, ‘stabilised, but not falsified’. A remarkable achievement. |
