FOCUSING ON HISTORY.(Technology Information)

Effects artists restore old film footage of atomic weapons tests for the film 13 Days

More than four decades ago, during the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis, the world hovered on the brink of nuclear disaster as two world powers squared off, ready to flex their atomic muscles. This scenario--perhaps the closest we've ever come to a nuclear war--is chronicled in the reality-based feature film 13 Days. Demonstrating the high stakes of this nuclear face-off, the movie opens with dramatic film footage of actual atomic bomb test explosions by the US and the former Soviet Union during the 1950s. Explosion shots are also used in scenes throughout the film.

Making these old, scratched, flickering clips palatable for today's movie audiences required the digital wizardry of effects artists at VCE.COM, a Hollywood-based visual effects company. "It's archival footage, so it has dirt, scratches, and other blemishes that occurred over time or were present in the original negatives," says Kurt Wiley, the VCE visual effects artist who performed most of the film restoration. "In the shot of Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded, we were dealing with huge pieces of flying dirt, flickers and flashes, odd color shifts ... you name it."

For VCE, peering into our nuclear history is not a new experience. The company's founder/president, Peter Kuran, owns a collection of archival film footage he purchased over the years while producing various films and documentaries focused on atomic history. Kuran also serves as a consultant to the US Department of Defense on the topic of film restoration and preservation. "It's important to preserve this visual legacy and help remind people in the future what this time period was really like," he says. "From my previous work, I have a clue in terms of what material is out there."

In fact, all of the nuclear explosion clips used in 13 Days were pulled from Kuran's film library. Whenever possible, Wiley used original footage of various blasts, but for the most part, he had to work with images that had been transferred from film that no longer existed to a different media, perhaps two or three times, each resulting in a loss of image quality.

Even the images that had already been restored by Kuran for his documentaries needed further cleanup. "A lot of that work was done in 1995, when I had fewer tools to work with, and no budget," says Kuran. "The producers wanted our footage but needed the images in better shape for their film."

While piecing together old footage for a movie may sound like a straightforward endeavor, that was definitely not the case for this project, given the poor quality of the images. Many shots were taken using hand-held cameras, while others were filmed from airplanes flying close to the blasts without the aid of today's camera stabilization equipment. Compounding this problem was the violent bucking of the aircraft following the blast, which resulted in jerky images that bounce around on the screen. Then there were the general effects of age, such as shrinking, which added more jitter, and color fading on the film as well as the negative, causing blue shadows and yellow highlights on subsequent positive images, Kuran explains.