Artist in the Spotlight - Tyler Purcell

Artist in the Spotlight – Tyler Purcell

Tyler Purcell began work at a public TV station aged 13 producing content before he could even drive (‘I actually had to get my licence early because my parents were driving me to shifts all the time’) and became the youngest live broadcast director on the East Coast at 15. It came as no surprise then that when he finished college, he decided to move to LA and pursue film. With a couple of features under his belt, Tyler saw that his real focus was in cinematography and post production: ‘shooting on my Super 8 was my whole life’.

WHY PHOENIX WAS THE WAY TO GO

The interest in restoration came about a few years ago when more and more friends or clients were coming to Tyler with old films which weren’t in the best nick but really wanted to see what was on them. ‘We were searching around to try to find a way of providing a service without killing us financially, and so we ended up buying a film scanner which had a wet gate and then getting Phoenix so that we could do the restoration digitally.’

And that was the magic combo that led to Tyler establishing Narrow Gauge Films, finding that the subscription was what was able to set them up.

‘One of the best things about Phoenix is that if you don’t need it for a couple of months, you can just opt out of the subscription. It’s hard for someone like me to have MTI where I’m paying maybe $1499 a month  – I can’t afford that! That might be the total I’m paid for the commission. 

‘But Phoenix, you can’t beat it. And then, of course, its functionality – you can’t beat that either because it’s so straightforward to use. I know that I can throw it in Phoenix, hit the automated button, walk away from it, come back, and it’s done.’

SEEING CALIFONIA’S WATERWAYS FROM LAST CENTURY

Tyler recently restored the archive of the Pacific Gas and Electric, who had curated and created dozens of films between the 40s and the 60s, with only 17 16mm prints remaining.

‘They were beat up. Missing perforations really scratched them, the damage really bad. We did a  two tier process where we cleaned them really good to go through the scanner and then used frame stabilisation, dirt removal, and scratch removal all in Phoenix. We had to do it in a week and a half so we prioritised the most interesting, historically significant ones. It took 30 hours of straight work.’

PGE Water Comparison Sample

WAT$R 
Wet Gate Scan

‘That’s what’s so great about doing restoration: taking something that has no value to anybody, and then saying, “Okay, let’s make this valuable again”. ‘

The problem lots of archives or companies face when they dig up these old film reels is that they struggle to find a way to monetise it: Tyler shared that they were the last stop before the films were on their way out. ‘I was like “are you kidding me? This is priceless stuff about our water system here in California!” I was just blown away.’

RESTORATION: THE CULTURAL EMERGENCY

Tyler’s taken an interest in raising awareness for the digital restoration of films and videotapes, sharing that loads of companies that he meets with are sitting on stock but aren’t restoring it. They think ‘it can just stay in archive and just scan it when they might one day need it in the future but don’t always realise that the literal film material itself will deteriorate. 

‘These people don’t understand that these tapes are never coming back, they won’t exist. You can’t prevent it from happening – it’s already happened! With videotapes, if you don’t transfer them, you’ll never get them out.’

Tyler laments the resistance they were met with: ‘no one understands the value of their assets. They don’t understand how to monetize it, they have to set up a whole new system for a client portal, so we are losing way more content than we should be right now. It’s off the hook, how much we’re losing. It’s shocking.’ In some cases, he’s opened up boxes in storage and was met with a cloud of dust, pieces of film already disintegrated. ‘Why even bother storing it if you’re going to let it get to this?’.

HELPING SAVE SENTIMENTAL RELICS

But there are some happy endings. Tyler was approached by an old film school teacher who had wanted to digitise his thesis made decades ago. The first reels he brought were practically dust, but when he went away to find the negatives, he came back with 12 boxes of the original footage, including the work print. Together, they scanned each scene and once it was all cleaned up, they edited together the film again.

Cold Blooded FINAL

Cold Blooded

‘Phoenix did a good job of removing all the scratches and marks. This was an incredible project. And he just wanted to share it with his family, it was sentimental’.

In another instance, a filmmaker came to him with the mission to make a feature film about this retired golfer and needed to restore the 16mm footage of him playing in the PGA Golf Tour all over the world. Each piece would break as it was unwound, but when it finally got scanned, Phoenix was able to clear out all the pink streaks and scratches from the individual splices they had to feed through.

Bad Color Print Restoration

Damaged Film before Restoration

For another project which was ‘completely baked’, Tyler had to manufacture a printed scanner that kept clogging after 100 feet of footage. Although originally he thought there was nothing to do to save it, Tyler decided to give it a go despite the film being like ‘leather’: ‘it was like transferring a piece of cowhide, it didn’t make any sense’. What was a labour of love, Meet Mrs Swenson (1956) was once again able to be watched after being left for 70 years.

R20 Meet Mrs Swenson Demo Restored

Meet Mrs. Swenson (1956)
Meet Mrs. Swenson (1956)

HOW FILM BECAME POPULAR AGAIN

It’s not just old footage which is being scanned: with lots of new releases like Oppenheimer (2023) and Poor Things (2024) being filmed with nitrate, Tyler and his team are scanning and digitising a lot more new stuff. Despite classically always shooting on film, Tyler came back to it in 2017 after going on a hiatus because its popularity was coming back. 

‘I started meeting people in the community and I saw its rise happening in front of my face. I thought, “here we go!”.’ This rise has meant Tyler also fixes a lot of camera equipment, since his know-how is pretty airtight with years of use. As more people get interested, they dig out these oldies which are a bit worse for wear, but are ready for some action again. ‘It’s great the way it is right now because what’s happened is that the control of motion picture film is in the hands of the consumers, not in the hands of some professionals only. I think that film’s going to stick around for a long time. Kodak reinvented themselves without even knowing it.’

His specialty is crafting a 90’s aesthetic in a shoot, which he believes doesn’t come from adding it in afterwards but the way in which it’s originally shot. He adds that colour nowadays is ‘very homogenised’, and its frustrating to watch things be overworked – ‘I feel like some colourists nowadays feel that they have to do something because if not maybe they won’t feel worthwhile in the project’, but what is actually needed is a balance.

WHAT CAN AI DO FOR RESTORATION

‘When we look at the whole big picture with AI coming into play, and the manipulation you can do with it, I think people are going to be moving away from digital, not towards it, because they’re going to want something more authentic.’

AI is on the forefront of many people’s minds, especially if you’re working in the creative sector. The biggest example of this were the SAG-AFTRA Hollywood strikes last year that was held over the potential harm AI could have on the industry. Tyler is equally sceptical of how it can affect post. However, the caveat could be restoration as it has the ability to develop tools to speed up your work or fix problems like frame replacement, like Loki.

Beyond that, he believes that governments will soon have to come to a conclusion that AI models can’t be trained from everything on the internet but rather from privately sourced footage. ‘It’s going to get worse before it gets better’. He mentioned that other major stock footage companies are also selling their footage – ‘stock footage is dead, there’s no such thing anymore because you’ll be able to type into any editorial programme what you want and it’ll generate it for you’. 

When he’s spoken with clients who commission photo shoots, they are planning to start making a lot of their campaigns through AI thanks to its ease – ‘they don’t want to do it, but they have to, to keep up, because everyone else is doing it’. But whilst it’s free now, it probably looks like it’ll be monetised in some capacity, subscription or otherwise, and then who profits? ‘Someone will make money, but it won’t be the creators!’.