New Stock

Last October, HBO Archives acquired The March of Time newsreel series, which was originally produced by Time. This series was started in 1935, but it includes footage from as early as 1913. Photo: Time Life Pictures

Stock houses are not what they used to be in your father's day. They're not even what they were on your last birthday.

If your production hasn't considered calling on a stock house for that tricky, remote, or expensive shot, you might want to reconsider and give them a visit. Many houses are now shooting their own material. Everything is in HD-or-better quality, or well on its way. They are trying to cover the planet, and chances are the shot you need is in a format that can be manipulated to fit your project.

Not only is the content more varied, the destinations and usage of the imagery are more varied as well. Gone are the days of the stock-house profile where the dusty, scratched archival footage arrives on Beta tape by FedEx. Footage houses today are developing fresh content for websites and digital displays that you can purchase over the Internet — sometimes very inexpensively. Several houses report that clients are increasingly opting to license hard- and expensive-to-shoot clips instead of shooting them themselves. Stock houses are becoming more story-conscious, and they are designing shoots with much more in mind than just selling you a single shot. One house even boasts that part of your film is already in the can, even though you haven't started shooting. Another is already delivering digital material in 4K.

However, this is not to diminish the worth or significance of those tried-and-true collections that are the repositories of our history and culture.

HBO opened a clip-licensing division only as recently as 2004, starting out with sports and wildlife. Last October, HBO Archives (www.hboarchives.com) acquired The March of Time newsreel series. Originally produced by Time, the archive was sold to Getty Images in the 1970s — only to be bought back now that HBO is under the Time Warner umbrella.

“March of Time is very different from other newsreels because they were mini documentaries,” says Max Segal, director of licensing for HBO Archives. “They spent 20 minutes on single topics. They were the 60 Minutes of their time.”

You might remember the fictitious March of Time episode in the opening of Citizen Kane. Time started the series in 1935, but the company often incorporated earlier footage — some as early as 1913. The series continued into the early '50s, then it carried on as a documentary unit until 1967.

“We're real excited about it,” Segal says. “And it's different. Besides being full-length documentaries, they were shot more feature-style as opposed to run-and-gun news style of the Hollywood studios. We converted the 1930s dollar, and they basically spent about $750 grand per episode. It was a lot of money compared to what everyone else is doing.”

The March of Time was all shot in 35mm, and it covers subjects as varied as “White-Collar Girls,” political conventions, “Life with Grandpa,” “The Birth of Swing,” exposés on boxing and horseracing, and “The Palestine Problem.” The series won Time an Academy Award in 1936 for revolutionizing the newsreel. Not only did the company keep all its 35mm in good shape, the company kept all the paperwork. There is a signed release in the files from Albert Einstein.

“We're [totally] recataloging everything,” Segal says, “which hadn't been done before. In talking to documentary producers, we're cataloging everything more on a clip basis than on a program basis, so it will help them better with matches. You say, ‘Well, you know, I have a 1935 milkman shot, but it's buried in this hour show.'' We're not doing that.

“We have a digital partner, Thought Equity [Motion], of Colorado, and they've been helping us restore the footage through a very expensive processor called ‘the archangel.'' The first thing we wanted to do was grab what we could grab, recatalog it, and get it out there. Now, the next step is we are going to take that 35 — with the help of Thought Equity — and we're going to start to convert it to HD. The HD part we're just starting.”

HBO Archives also carries contemporary material, mostly B-roll from its documentaries, such as its recent film Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry — all shot in HD, of course.

Getty Images did three inhouse productions for its footage library, including one shoot of a fashion show in London with Mont Blanc Films.

Getty Images has steadily built up one of the all-time great still- and moving-imagery libraries with 60 million images and 15,000 hours of film. If you have licensed archival material in the past, there's a good chance it was owned by Getty. The company's still-image branch represents the Hulton Archive of England, Time & Life Pictures, the George Eastman House, and The New York Times archive. Moving images cover the AP Archive, Archive Films, the Prelinger Archive, Discovery Footage Source, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. Getty has now added audio to its expansive portfolio.

“Getty Images acquired Pump Audio, which really allowed our company to take the next step in our digital-media strategy,” says Kristl Date-Dopps, Getty director of product marketing for film. “There is the explosion of online and mobile multimedia, which is creating this need for music, and Getty Images' purchase of Pump Audio allows us to make music licensing simple and accessible.”

Pump Audio is a catalog of pre-cleared music by independent artists in any genre, and it is accessible from an easy-to-use platform. “They also have a really snappy and innovative tool that allows you to marry up footage clips and test it out with certain audio tracts to see how those play together,” Date-Dopps says. “It's really simple. Our editors have told us that it's one of the most simple interfaces that they've used for music. So I think it's definitely going to revolutionize that industry.”

Last year, Getty also purchased iStockphoto, the sharing platform that markets user-generated content. “iStock is the leading stock-photography community that helped introduce the whole micropayment phenomenon to the industry,” Date-Dopps says. “People can upload their photos to the site and get royalties back on licenses that are conducted. This is really a value-priced imagery solution. Images start at about $1. We've now created a video component to that whole model.”

iStockvideo was launched in early 2007, and it is the fastest-growing segment of Getty's online business. Clips start at $10, depending on the type and size of the file — which range from standard-definition NTSC and PAL to high-def 720 and 1080.

Not to be outdone for inhouse production, Getty did three shoots earlier last year. On the first shoot, Getty partnered with Mont Blanc Films for a fashion show at Wimbledon Studios in London — showing both high fashion and what the facility called the “local heroes catwalk,” which depicted everyday workers such as teachers and firemen. They shot with two HD cameras to capture different looks — a handheld Sony HDW-750 for an editorial feel and a Varicam to create master shots with an advertising feel.

The second shoot was called “Queen Bee,” which Getty partnered with HKM (Hate Kills Man) to produce. Using the new Arriflex D-20, they filmed women in leadership roles in a highly art-directed business shoot. The third shoot — with filmmaker Frank Suffert — was at the Munich Airport, where they covered two extensive shot lists over two days using a Sony HDW-750.

Sony Pictures Stock Footage has digitized more than 100,000 clips, which go back as far as 30 years. Sony has garnered a lot of use from its high-end pyrotechnics footage from lower-budget productions that can''t afford to stage and shoot their own explosions.

Sony Pictures has been the most aggressive studio by far in digitizing material and making it available, with more than 100,000 clips now on the company's website. The only thing Sony Pictures Stock Footage sells is what the studio has boxed up and classified as stock footage. Beginning in 2003, Sony Pictures started cataloging and digitizing its archive, which goes back about 30 years (before the company started running into copyright and storage problems). Last year, the company got everything online up to date.

“Basically, as soon as a production is hitting the DVD shelves, we can make the stock footage available for licensing,” says Rick Sievers, sales manager for the stock footage department. “As far as Spider-Man 3 goes, we have some amazing shots filmed on VistaVision, which is the 8-perf 35mm. They called it the ‘Spideycam,'' and they suspended cables throughout a several-block area in New York. So it's actually a POV as if you are flying between the buildings like Spider-Man from building to building. They suspend a remote-controlled camera from these cables, and then the camera can tilt and pan and zoom. You're pretty much flying down the canyons of New York between the buildings.”

Films are searchable by title, which is helpful to Sievers as well as the client. What is labeled as stock is the B-roll, second-unit, establishing shots — anything that doesn't show principal talent. This leaves plenty of quality footage. “We have gone ahead and cataloged a lot of the stunts and pyrotechnics — a lot of the really high production value shots that can be somewhat iconic in a movie,” Sievers says. “We've cataloged that into what we call our ‘Premium Collection.'' So some of those would require additional clearances, like stunt actors — they would have to be paid their day rates for TV or feature-film productions, but they are available.

“The same goes for explosions. Certainly one of the things Hollywood loves to do is blow things up. We've benefited from that, and we have a lot of high-end pyrotechnics that some of the lower-budget productions and TV shows and documentaries can really take advantage of to increase their production value at a tiny fraction of the cost that it would take to actually produce something like that themselves.”

Sony has converted everything to HD 1080/24p. The company makes an interpositive from the original camera negative and uses that as its production element to downconvert to Digi Beta or any other format required. Sony also goes back to the interpositive for 2K or 4K scans. The company has made no editorial or creative decisions as to what to archive. If there are five takes to a scene, it is all available. There is also very little color correcting. You're pretty much being offered raw footage to do with it what you will. “If you don't find it on our website and want to know if there is more, the answer is going to be ‘no,''” Sievers says.

One of Sievers' favorite recent acquisitions is from the little-seen film Stealth. “They put a VistaVision camera on a fighter jet and have these amazing cloud POVs doing maneuvers in and around clouds at really high rates of speed — flying through canyons and over all kinds of desert and mountainous terrain. It's unique. It's not sped up. It's really a fighter jet. We have some helicopter shots as well. We really benefited in the stock-footage department from that. It's been one of our best-selling titles.”

FootageBank HD, founded in 2002, has 45,000 clips available online. The company specializes in wildlife and establishing shots from all over the world, shooting primarily with a Sony CineAlta HDW-F900 at 24p.

FootageBank HD is an HD-specialty house, and it has been so since its founding in 2002. The company has 45,000 clips online, and it specializes in wildlife and establishing shots — covering cities and towns across America in all seasons and matching day and night. The company has a cinematographer in the field all the time, shooting with a Sony CineAlta HDW-F900 at 24p.

“[Last summer,] we sent [our DP] to Texas,” says founder Paula Lumbard, formerly of Filmbank. “He covered Dallas, Austin, Houston, as well as border towns. In the last year, he has been to Atlanta; Savannah, [Ga.]; Miami. He's shooting in Minneapolis right now [November 2007], and Chicago. … It's a full-time thing, and it drives a lot of our business in providing establishing shots anywhere in the country. Soon he'll be traveling outside of the country.”

Lumbard also represents shooters in other parts of the world, and she just acquired footage from Paris; Istanbul, Turkey; and Mexico. She also has a team in Costa Rica; that same team also shot underwater footage in the Cayman Islands.

One of her more interesting shoots was for FootageBank's Natural History Collection. DP Rob Englehardt of Kaos Entertainment went to Montana to work with Animals of Montana, a wildlife-casting agency. For several days, he shot grizzly bears and wolves — in a friendly way. Could there be a remake of Man in the Wilderness in the works? Lumbard is intent on capturing images people think about but that they don't imagine ever getting on film.

FootageBank HD also has the clip licensing from K2 Communications, the large-format filmmakers who brought us Ring of Fire (volcanoes), Adrenaline Rush (extreme cliff jumping), and Bugs (bugs). This large-format material is downconverted to D5. “We really are all about feeding the ultimate pixels to our clients,” Lumbard says.

Bennett-Watt HD Productions has been shooting HD footage from all around the world since 2000. The company''s Discoveries series includes more than 65 hours of footage.

Bennett-Watt HD Productions is a production house that was founded by Jim and Kelly Watt in 1978. They've been shooting in HD since 2000, when they began production on Discoveries…Ireland, a 3-hour travelogue. Next, they made a 7-hour Discoveries…Spain, then the 4-hour Discoveries…Argentina. After the tragedy of Sept. 11, the duo turned their cameras on America. The result was Discoveries…America, 51 hour-long shows on every state, including Washington, D.C. They just finished late last year, after shooting 1,800 hours of footage.

“Basically, we just traveled around and did stories about people and places — and, of course, the obvious tourist things that give the state its personality,” Jim Watt says. “We tried to let the people tell their own stories so you could hear what they sounded like, which is interesting across the country. And you get a feel for their passion of what they did. I mean, we have everything — from NASCAR racing schools in North Carolina to oystermen in Alabama and shrimpers. Anything and everything — sculptors and artists. And we did a few national parks, a lot of history and monuments, but also neighborhoods and markets. It was really a kick.”

The Watts crossed the country pulling a trailer with an Apple Power Mac G5 HD editing system equipped with AJA Kona 2 and Kona LH cards and running Final Cut Pro 5. They spent three weeks in each state. Jim would screen the material, pull the shots, and write the script, while Kelly would set up the shoot for the next state.

“We only shoot and sell HD, and we've been shooting 1080i since 2000,” Jim says. “Plus, we have a 720p Varicam that we bought two years go. It's the newest Varicam model out, the H model. We bought the very first HD camera Panasonic sold in the world. It was a 1080i camera — and it was before they ever thought of the Varicam — and it still takes spectacular pictures that I would put up against any 1080i camera around. It's an AJ-HDC20A. … Then we have some Sony HDV cameras. Once Sony brought out the SXR, the small, consumer-looking camera that was little and not terribly expensive, it just gives you the opportunity to take a camera to a lot of places you couldn't take the big camera — and also maybe risk it in a few places you wouldn't want to risk the bigger cameras.”

The series is available on DVD at www.discoveriesamerica.com. When pressed for his favorite shots, Jim says: “POV shots in a NASCAR racecar going around Lowe's Motor Speedway at 170mph just takes your breath away. Yet, some of the spectacular sunrises and sunsets you see in various parts of the world are equally so. Windsurfing or kiteboarding in Hawaii — we just have such a vast variety of material. Alaska — just getting out in the middle of Denali Park and seeing the animals, the grizzlies, the caribou — just spectacular life.”

Thought Equity Motion''s Storyline Collection brings “threaded” footage—content with multiple scenes to create a one-story package—to the production industry.

According to its website, Thought Equity Motion is “the world's largest provider of online motion content.” The company has formed exclusive content partnerships with premier film and entertainment companies such as NBC News, National Geographic, Sony Pictures Entertainment, HBO Archives, the NCAA, and Warren Miller Entertainment.

Beyond the company's representation, however, it wants to be the premier resource for digital storytellers. “We've decided with new technology and new media and all the convergence that is happening, being just a clip company is not going to be good enough,” says Thought Equity Motion CEO Kevin Schaff. “The storyteller needs access to a lot more. So what Thought Equity has turned into is a content agency. … One of the things that Thought Equity is really focused on this year [2007] is the idea of the storyline.”

Thought Equity has released its Storyline Collection in an effort to, what the company calls, “scale” storytelling. The company wants to play to the strength of motion content for storytelling, as opposed to still content — which is used merely to illustrate. The company has hired top talent to go out and shoot stories that are “threaded.” “It's the kind of content you look and say, ‘That's not stock,''” Schaff says. “The usefulness and the practicality of it is that it's shot in a way that we call ‘threaded.'' For example, we might have an older lady and an older gentleman walking down the street where she doesn't feel all that good. Then there will be another clip that connects to that clip — same exact actors, but now they're sitting in a doctor's office. Or the lady is just sitting in the doctor's office by herself. Then, the next part to that storyline is that she's out playing tennis because she feels better. We don't care what the product is or what the message is. It's all about cause and effect. It's all about beginning, middle, and end.”

Thought Equity Motion did its first shoot for the Storyline Collection in August 2007. The company searched for a new suburb development with houses that were finished and some that were still under construction. Thought Equity cast a family with a pregnant wife, and then the company filmed them shopping for a home, moving, and settling in. The stock house also reshot the same scenarios with casts of different ethnicities for use in multiple markets. “It's really a totally different way to produce this content,” Schaff says. “Not only so people can use it better, but it really pushes the limits of commercial production, because it's like shooting 20 different commercials all at once. It requires unbelievable planning, but it's a ton of fun.”

The shoots are all done on 35mm, then they are scanned and stored at 4K. At a 4K scan, the client can get pristine stills — which are available to clients with the purchase of the footage. “Sometimes we'll do hybrid, where cameras one and two will be film, and cameras three and four will be HD,” Schaff says. “It just gives us a little more future-proof. People are selling high-def televisions and want to show enhanced resolutions, we've got the assets that we can bring up.”

Artbeats used a Learjet with a Sony HDW-F900 mounted in the nose to capture aerial footage.

Artbeats, founded in 1989, is a boutique stock house offering royalty-free footage with unlimited use and licensed for broadcast worldwide at very affordable prices. The company also is producing unique shoots guaranteed to be one of a kind.

“We've done two major shoots this year [2007],” says Artbeats CEO and Creative Director Phil Bates. “One of them was involving a Learjet with Wolfe Air. They're a contractor we use for doing aerial footage. They have a Learjet that's specially equipped with a bottom port that allows them to shoot side-to-side air-to-air footage, as well as a nose-camera mount so that we can shoot POV footage. The purpose of this shoot was actually to shoot flying through clouds, because that happens to be a very good seller of ours. We didn't have any high-def version of that. But while we were up there, I figured maybe we should go ahead and find a business jet to shoot at the same time, because nobody else has that really. We love to do things that nobody else has. I get jazzed about doing stuff like that because that's really our business model: to provide things that are difficult or expensive to shoot. So we found we could get a business jet, and there was somebody else at Van Nuys Airport [the base for the film shoot] that had an F5 fighter jet. I thought, ‘Well, in for a penny, in for a pound; why don't we go ahead and take that up for an hour or two and shoot that as well as the business jet.''”

Artbeats' next big investment turned into a 13-day aerial shoot across the country by helicopter. Bates had gotten requests for aerials of Dallas and Miami. When he looked at the fees for ferrying all his equipment over, it seemed more worthwhile to fly there and film along the way. Again, they turned to Wolfe Air.

“The mount that they used on the helicopter — they have developed a gyro-stabilized gimbal called ‘Gyron,'' which is very smooth,” Bates says. “It gets rid of all the vibrations and bumps and jitters and things like that, so we get ultra-smooth footage from that.”

Artbeats shoots with Sony HDW-F900 cameras, then the footage is converted to digital files — which are delivered to clients as QuickTime files.

Mammoth HD opened its 4K library with footage shot with the Red Digital Cinema Red One camera in November 2007.

Mammoth HD is a relatively new company, having started in 2003. But like many young companies without a dated infrastructure or library, the company is able to jump in with the latest technology. “We're a stock agency specializing in high definition,” says CEO and Creative Director Clark Dunbar, “and now, we're going to be saying ‘and above,'' with the 4K library opening up later this week [November 2007] in fact.

“We didn't do much inhouse shooting per se this year,” Dunbar says, “but a lot of our shooters are sending in some really great material. Where we got real excited was when the Red [One] camera started shooting late August. Several of our guys have gotten cameras. I had a chance to get my hands on one and did some shooting myself. It has lived up to all the expectations that I had already built in, and we're starting to get footage in that is really spectacular.”

Dunbar got his hands on a Red One camera last September when he was at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, and he's not looking back. “I see it as a huge expansion,” Dunbar says. “I see it as the future of stock footage. It's just a matter of how much can be shot to build a library around those specifications. The images are so clean, and the camera is affordable. Compared to a lot of the tools that are out there now, it's anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent of the cost of other HD cameras, and it shoots four times the resolution.”

The Red One camera is the brainchild of Oakley founder Jim Jannard, and it has been the buzz of the entire industry. The main reason Dunbar is so excited is that with an image of 4,000 pixels, he can downconvert it to any format possible — and the infrastructure is finally in place from which to work.

“We can down-rez it to 2K for the current postproduction pipelines that are in place now for 2K, and that opens up indie films and a lot of feature films with everyone slowly moving into 4K for post and 4K production,” Dunbar says. “Then, on our digital-signage side of the world of our client base, we can actually do a vertical HD clip right out of the 4K — without turning the camera. We just use that same clip we shot and fulfill the vertical format needs with just a center-pull or a pan-and-scan across the 4K image. That's one of the things we love about 4K. It gives us every one of those market segments — from feature films to digital signage to broadcast — for whatever spec you want.”

Dunbar reps 70 people — shooters and production companies — that supply him with footage. Of that group, 15 to 20 have ordered Red One cameras; four have them in-hand as of November.

Yes, your stock house is a whole new home.

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HBO Archives has been digging ever deeper into its treasure trove of The March of Time footage, and it is transferring the pristine 35mm to HD on an on-demand basis. The company is looking at the non-newsreel productions to broaden the scope of its offerings. HBO also uncovered 28 episodes of a 1953 TV show on subjects such as atomic power; Las Vegas; Pakistan; and Bangkok, Thailand. Another series, from the mid-60s, covers the presidency, psychology, and the automobile. The company is currently cataloging the 26-part Crusade in the Pacific, a profile on Asia before, during, and after World War II.

As NAB approaches, Sony Pictures Stock Footage has just added its 100,000th clip to its collection, making it the largest online source of studio-produced stock and premium footage by far, according to the company. This includes establishing shots of London and Paris from The Da Vinci Code and aerials of the U.S. Military and the Moroccan coastline from Black Hawk Down. Sony is also acquiring a new collection of extreme surfing and windsurfing footage.

FootageBank HD has also jumped on the Red Digital Cinema Red One camera bandwagon by signing an agreement with the Digital Cinema Society (DCS) to create a “Red Footage Collective.” The company will represent footage shot by selected DCS members. Five percent of all revenue generated by the shooters will be donated to the DCS. FootageBank HD also signed aerial HD cinematography company Omniscience — owned by Gary Kauffman of West Glacier, Mont. — to shoot custom motion-stabilized HD of the North and Southwest United States.

In December, Bennett-Watt HD Productions was busy with a three-week shoot in India, and in January, the company spent several weeks shooting in China. In India, the company mostly shot in the desert province of Rajasthan, but the company also covered the Taj Mahal, Ranthambore National Park, Varanasi on the Ganges, and the rural communities of Jaipur and Jodhpur. In China, the company captured Beijing in the snow, the Great Wall of China, Xi'an, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, as well as the Li River covered in mist. Last month and this month, the company was shooting in Korea and Japan.

In February, Thought Equity Motion finally released its Storyline Collection, which includes some 1,000 scenarios. Thought Equity Motion has also added the Paramount Pictures collection to its online-distribution arm, which now covers 60 percent of the major studios' stock footage. Most significantly, the company has just released its Thought Equity 3.0 search engine that searches subjects through subsets and in context. The company's Screening Room feature allows you to drag and drop your clips into a sequence and add music from the company's license-free catalog. All of this fits Thought Equity Motion's M.O. to deliver customized content. Some assembly required.

Artbeats has completed an intensive eight-week shoot using the Vision Research Phantom HD high-speed camera. Knowing slow motion always sells well, Artbeats focused on shooting nature shots of water dripping and flowing, waterfalls, rain, butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, waves, whales, and birds. The company also captured slow-motion footage of milk, blood, smoke, fabric, fire, coins, dice, children, skateboarders, swimming, diving, and rodeos.

In February, Mammoth HD premiered its MHD/Red 4K Library of footage shot with the Red Digital Cinema Red One camera. Topics include lifestyle, family and kids, wildlife, nature, underwater and ocean life, locations, recreation, scenics, transportation, time lapse, sports, and weather. Mammoth has also added the first of a series of online demo reels of footage shot with the Red One.