Restoring views of the fair
Thursday, April 10, 2014 at 11:24AM
Ryan Ritchey

As I've said before, one of the challenges in making this film has been gathering the photos,slides, and home movies of the fair itself. Once we get those materials though, that's only the beginning of the process to prepare them for the movie. Although time-consuming, one of my favorite parts of that process is slide restoration. 

deteriorating35mm slides can offer an incredible amount of detail, however given their small size, it doesn't take much of a scratch, piece of dust, or hair to ruin a good shot. Then there's the fact that these slides are now nearly 50 years old. In some cases, the slides after deteriorated or discolored through the years.

As I said, the process of restoring/cleaning these slides digitally takes a lot of time, especially when you have thousands of slides in front of you. At first, we planned on only cleaning the slides that made it into the film. However, the history that these slides represent is too important to not take this opportunity to clean and restore all of them. So, although it has added some time to getting the movie completed, I think it has certainly been well worth it.

Here's a look at the before and after of one slide of the British Lion Pub:

 

Article originally appeared on After the Fair (http://worldsfairmovie.com/).
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