THE MOTHERS OF PREVENTION: Inside the Film Preservation Process
almost 10 years ago – Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 06:14:45 AM

Guten Tag Backers! 

We are now deep into the preservation work, with multiple teams busily archiving the Vault materials. It’s truly a sight to behold and, of course, I want to share some of that with you guys.

There's plenty to do in the Vault itself, but my favorite part of the process so far is the film work that's being done at an off-site facility with a truly extraordinary proprietary system. I’ve never seen anything like it. 

The Film Preservation Process

Movie film is extremely sensitive, and will completely disintegrate over time. And guys, there is a LOT of film in the Zappa vault; outtakes from Frank’s movies, original prints and negatives, concert footage, home movies, personal art projects, and on, and on. And because Frank did a lot of his own editing, much his film has editing cuts all throughout it, some dating back to the 1960s, which means this material is even more delicate.

It’s a precarious and critical mission for us to perfectly preserve and archive it before it's forever lost — and without losing a single frame of the original footage.

Film preservation involves scanning the footage through a machine called a film gate. Under normal film archival processes, some of this material won’t survive ever being run through a film gate more than once. Since you'll end up with a digital version, a lot of the time, that doesn't matter. But obviously, that wasn’t good enough for us. We don’t want any of Frank's original material to be destroyed: After we archive it, we want it safely back in the Vault! 

So, we had to find film archivists who could assure us they had a method that wouldn’t destroy the film in the process. And find them, we did. 

The folks doing our film work have created a patented system that treats the film with kid gloves. Usually, film comes into contact with equipment throughout the process, which is why it doesn't survive. But with this equipment, only the very edges of the film touch the machinery. It's guided through the film gate, captured with a laser, and digitized, instead of using a standard sprocket system that could potentially tear the film. Think of this as a "floating system." 

Here’s what it looks like up close:

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And this kind of care and precision is driving the process on all the different types of material, which will be archived and then put back in the vault exactly as we found them, with zero wear and tear.

Here are a couple more photos from the off-site video lab of FZ's work (safely!) coming back to life:

It's been an amazing first few weeks, and we're already finding a ton of gold, including rare rehearsal footage, live performances, home movies and more, spanning from the mid '60s onward… and that’s just the first round of stuff we've seen — from the first batch. There's so, so, so much more, it's unbelievable. 

As we finish digitizing the material and get copies back on our drives, I will definitely start including some highlights in these updates. Can't wait to share it with you!

DIRTY MIND, Continued...

Of course, sharing is a two-way street! And after I talked about Prince in the last update, I received something pretty fucking awesome: Todd Yvega, an FZ collaborator who transcribed Frank’s Synclavier compositions for the Ensemble Modern, sent this story our way:

"One day in the studio, during the course of regular studio banter, the subject of Prince somehow came up. Most of the guys up on their high horses disparaged Prince for his "sex and purple fantasy" image. Frank made his point that he admires Prince simply for being dedicated and a hard worker. I asked Frank if he had met Prince, whereupon he said, "Well I tried, but he ran away!" Naturally that struck me as one hell of a teaser so I asked for elaboration. Frank said he was at an industry event where Prince was in attendance. Frank spotted Prince and decided he'd walk over and introduce himself. But when Prince saw Frank walking toward him, he looked like got scared and just ran away. The way Frank told it gave the impression that he just shrugged it off and thought, "Oh well." 

Thanks for sharing this, Todd!! 

As always, if anyone else has stories or extra information to share, I hope you'll send it to me, or post it in the comments where everyone can enjoy.

And now, back to work! 

There is an enormous amount to do, especially as we get started, so I hope you guys will understand if if I keep my head down and stay focused on getting the process rolling. It's a lot to manage, so we all want to make sure we're completely on top of it. As a result, I'll probably be a little slower with updates and responding to personal messages in the comments and on social media for a little while. But I promise, I'll still be here working. :)

Onward!

Alex Winter

WE ARE NOT ALONE: 8688 Backers Raised $1.2MM to Save The Vault! So... What Happens Now?
almost 10 years ago – Tue, Jun 07, 2016 at 10:24:45 AM

Good "Morning After", Freaks!

Okay, not much brain power left, so bear with me... Our Kickstarter is over, and even though there's still a lot more to talk about, here's the most important headline:

Together, we've raised a total of $1,214,036!

That'll be enough to help Joe Travers save a ton of at-risk material from the Vault, so that it'll be around for future generations… and, of course, to let us make the definitive Zappa doc!

It's been a fantastic ride so far, and I'm so psyched that more than a thousand of you joined us during our live "Final Countdown" webcast.

Seriously, I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am. YOU GUYS ROCK!!!

Now, I know I've sent a lot of updates over the last month, so I promise, I'll cool it for a little while and let you breathe. In a few weeks, we'll start sending out details about your Kickstarter rewards, so you know what to expect (and when)! But first, just a few more things to tell you.

The Kickstarter is now officially over, which means that...

1. Preservation work in the Vault starts now. 

There's no time to waste, so Joe and I have already started working on next steps for the preservation process. I'll share more details as we work them out, but I can tell you this: We'll be busy beavers for a while.

2. Add-On Rewards are still available...

By the time I woke up this morning, I had a ton of messages saying that you guys want to keep going, and asking if can still unlock the remaining stretch goal. So, we'll need to figure out a few details, but for now, you can keep getting Add-On Rewards, and we'll keep updating the tally. And yes..

3. So, we can still reach our final stretch goal! 

To be honest, I still can't believe that we managed to pass our $1MM goal, smash through our first stretch goal and came crazy close to hitting our final stretch goal... all in our last 24 hours! It's totally insane. And even though we didn't quite reach the final goal of $1.25MM, a lot of you are really into the "Interactive Vault" app idea… so, if we raise the rest of what we need, yes, we'll still make it happen!

4. Didn't get to pledge? You'll still be able to join us.

Since so many people are asking: Yes, we're looking into ways to let more people join and pledge. We can't officially do it on Kickstarter, but we're hoping anyone who missed out will still be able to join us as a "Slacker Backer." More on that soon, so stay tuned!

And, finally…

5. We'll share the webcast video next week!

I know that, for a lot of you, our live "Final Countdown" happened in the middle of the night... but we shared some crazy unreleased Frank videos and recordings, and we want to make sure you can see it too! 

So, don't worry: We're fixing some audio sync issues and talking to YouTube about a minor legal issue (involving copyright clearances for one of Frank's songs that we played!!!), but we will post the full video on YouTube and send it a Backer update once it's live. Hang tight: It won't be much longer!

Okay, that's it for today. I'm going back to bed.

And, one more time: thank you for deciding to be part of this project. 

We've got an awesome adventure in front of us!

Onward,

Alex Winter

CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER: Next Steps for Saving the Vault
almost 10 years ago – Tue, Jun 07, 2016 at 10:24:19 AM

Hey Freaks,

We’re off to the races!

Under the watchful eye of Joe "Vaultmeister" Travers, my team and I have been deep in the trenches since the campaign ended, organizing the breakdown of materials, allocating the funds and prepping the companies that are handling the archival work, so we could begin the process.

And since there's no time to waste, I'm really happy to tell you:

Preservation work has already started on our first batch of material: 200 reels of film footage and audio recordings, and about 100 reels of videotape!

Now, keep in mind: There is a lot of stuff to get through, so this is going to be happening for many months. But as we start to dig in, and find out more about what's in there, I'll keep you posted, and try to share more about the process.

Today, I just wanted to give you a few more details about exactly what's happening.

What happens now?

TRANSPORTATION. The first step for a lot of this material is simply getting it to the the right place. Some of the material has already been transported – very carefully! – to archival facilities where the work will be done with state-of-the-art equipment. And some of the material is too delicate to be moved, so the archiving work will happen in the Vault itself.

HIRING EXPERT TEAMS. After that, the specific steps are a little different for each type of media. As we get farther into the work, I'll try to give you a look at how we're dealing with a lot of the different formats… but for now, I want to make sure you know that we're not taking any chances with this stuff: Working with Joe and a lot of expert advisors, we've done a ton of careful vetting and selected some of the best preservation experts and teams in the world to get this done, and get it done right.

CONVERTING TO MODERN FORMATS. And remember, the work isn't just to preserve the Vault: We also need to convert what we find into a form that we can use for the documentary – and save for the future – because a ton of this material was captured on media that hasn't been used (or even available) for a long time.

DIGITIZING & ARCHIVING. So, we also need to digitize the media, and archive it in a fully uncompressed format, which is often an analog-to-analog process. That means that some of the media doesn't just go onto tape drives, hard drives and into the cloud, but onto fresh analog media. Plus, everything is being backed up to high-end LTO digital tape, which has a shelf life of 30 to 50 years! You can probably guess, but all of this requires an enormous amount of tape and hard drive space.

AUDIO BAKING. As part of the process, some of the audio reels are also being baked, which means exactly what it sounds like – we go through a literal baking process that removes moisture absorption from the tape without disturbing the precious audio. Fucking cool, right?

What are we saving?

So, one of the weird things about this whole process is that we don't even know for sure what's on a lot of these reels. Many of them are labeled, but as Joe told me, there's a really good chance that some things got mislabeled decades ago, or that we'll find more stuff on the tapes than we're expecting from the 2-3 word labels. And since we need to preserve and restore the film and tape before it's safe to watch or listen to it, we won't have a complete idea of what we've got until we're done saving it!

But I can already tell you how much we're saving, and how many different media formats we're working with. This part will make your head spin, because FZ was a rigorous archivist who started saving everything right at the beginning of his career, and was constantly moving older recordings onto new master tapes for safe-keeping. So, in a nutshell...

AUDIO

• U-MATIC DIGITAL TAPES (1,000+): Each tape is 60-75 min. 
• MULTI-TRACK MASTER TAPES (1,200): Each tape is an hour. 
• 1/2" FOUR-TRACK TOUR MASTERS (750): Each tape is about 30 minutes. 
• 2" MULTI TRACK TAPES: There are hundreds. Still getting an exact count.

VIDEO & FILM

• 35mm, 16mm, SUPER 8 FILM: Hundreds of reels. 
• D2, BETACAM (Digi & SP), ¾” TAPE: Hundreds of hours. 
• VHS (STANDARD + SUPER): Hundreds of hours in NTSC and PAL.

And what is on all this stuff? Like I said, we won't have an exact list until we're done preserving it, but we've got a pretty damn good idea of some of what we'll find: Concert recordings, recording outtakes and masters, unseen interviews, movie outtakes… and then, a whole lot of boxes where we simply have no idea what is in them. 

I can’t tell you how good it feels to start getting this material preserved. Honestly, I feel so incredibly proud to be part of making this happen, and I hope all of you do too – because it wouldn't be happening without you.

Also, I know many of you are just as eager as I am to see and hear some of what we find. Like I promised during the campaign, even though we're using all of the Kickstarter funds to help preserve, digitize and catalog the Vault, that's still a huge part of the work that has to be done for the movie. Our team is also setting up workstations that will let us start viewing and logging all of the material as it gets saved, so that we can begin the work of telling FZ's story.

In future updates, I'll keep telling you how the preservation process is going, but I'll also do my best to keep you informed about what it means for the film, and how that effort is going too. Like I said near the end of the Kickstarter, we will still need some additional funding to cover some of our production and post-production costs -- but we always knew we'd need that if we didn't raise the full $3MM I outlined in our Kickstarter video. So, we've also started the process of talking to interested investors, so that we can start scheduling interviews and shoots while the preservation work is happening.

(And I have to tell you: being able to tell investors we're the top crowdfunded doc project ever is going to do a lot to help us get the rest of what we need.)

DIRTY MIND: The loss of another legend

Of course, as a community that came together out of love for a legendary musician, we can't end this update without a few words about Prince’s tragic passing this week.

It's a devastating loss of a prolific musical genius, because Prince was a true titan -- and despite the difference in their musical styles and influences, the two had a lot more in common than you might think.

Like Frank, Prince had his own Vault full of recordings, which supposedly has "enough un-released music to put out an album every year for the next 100 years."

Like Frank, Prince was incredibly committed to defending artists' rights.

And, like Frank, Prince's music put him at the center of the government's attempts to censor creative expression. In her book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, Tipper Gore describes how it was Prince that motivated her to form a government committee to enforce restrictions on media content:

"In December 1984, I purchased Prince's best-selling album Purple Rain for my 11-year-old daughter... When we brought the album home, put it on our stereo, and listened to it together, we heard the words to..."Darling Nikki": "I knew a girl named Nikki / guess [you] could say she was a sex fiend / I met her in a hotel lobby / Masturbating with a magazine." The song went on and on, in a similar manner. I couldn't believe my ears! The vulgar lyrics embarrassed both of us. At first, I was stunned—then I got mad!"

So, if you're keeping track: Yes, it was Prince's music that led to the creation of the PMRC, which Frank fought back against in the Senate. Of course – no offense to Prince – Zappa felt he could have gone even farther. In The Real Frank Zappa Book, FZ noted that:

"The PMRC's list of people [...] who were 'offensive' in 1985 was pretty ridiculous… The Jacksons were on for 'Torture', Bruce Springsteen was on for 'I'm on Fire', and of course, Prince, for the fabulous 'Darling Nikki.' Where was [Prince] throughout all of this? He went apeshit and sued some spaghetti company for calling their product 'Prince', but remained curiously silent during the record-ratings stuff."

I don't know if FZ and Prince ever met, but I hope so. They believed in so many of the same things, and were both so unique, that I have to think they'd have liked each other.

We miss you, Prince.

Onward!

Alex Winter

WE'RE LIVE! Final Countdown is happening now!!!
about 10 years ago – Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 10:38:07 AM

Freaks!

After a few technical problems...

We're live and broadcasting right now.

Come join us for the FINAL COUNTDOWN!

Alex