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The Lost World - 1925
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The Lost World - 1925

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George Eastman House Restoration Main Page
This article originally appeared in 1997. It is maintained here for archival purposes. The fund-raising effort has concluded. Please do not send additional donations. Any inquiries about the George Eastman House restoration should be sent directly to the George Eastman House. We are unable to get any information from them about the current status of their print.

 
Articles on this page:
1. Making Release Prints of a 1925 Dinosaur Movie
2. Ed Stratmann's Restoration Diary
3. Announcements about the Restoration

Making Release Prints of a 1925 Dinosaur Movie
 
On June 28, 1997 D.I.G. received exactly the following e-mail:
>Today 28th of June we the laboratory Haghefilm in Amsterdam, have send the finnished restored print by courier to the George Eastman House in Rochester.
>The total lenght of the new print is 2170 meters, with new made intertitles in the parts of the Praghe material.
>The print is made from a black & white negative on to color stock, by
>the Desmet methode ( tinting and toning by a color flash )
>We hope that the film will be a success when it will be shown on August 8th.
>
>Kind regards,
>Johan Prijs
>Technical supervisor
>Haghefilm Conservation, Amsterdam
This was pretty exciting news after waiting nearly 72 years! We asked Mr. Prijs if he would write a little account of what they did to make the actual restored film which will be projected on movie screens around the world. And he wrote us back!
 
"Herewith as requested a few paragraphs about the restoration work we did
for the Geoge Eastman House. Please forgive my bad English, it is not so good." J.P.


Restoration of "The Lost World" at Haghefilm Conservation Llaboratory, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
 

In the beginning of this year we received a 35mm black & white master positive preserved by the Prague archive and a 16mm black & white master positive from the George Eastman House. The Prague material was dry-printed therefore all the damages and scratches did show up in the master (Normally film with very bad scratches is printed with a process called "wet gate" which covers the film with a liquid and helps to optically "remove" the scratches. Editor),  also the missing frames were replaced with black frames. The 16mm master was a dry-printed reduction print, and much shorter than the print from Prague, but there was a sequence which was missing in the 35mm master.

From the 35mm master and the missing sequence on 16mm we made a 35mm duplicate black & white negative, and from this negative a new master positive which we send to the G.E.H. for editing. Ed Stratmann and his team assembled the scenes in the right order, and as completely as possible, together with a master positive that was preserved some years before.

When we received the edited master on the 11th of July together with the text of the credits and the missing and translated Czech intertitles we could finally start making the most complete restored version.

From the master with the earlier preserved scenes inserted by the G.E.H. we had to make a new duplicate negative. The position of the frameline was different then the rest of the materials, so we shifted the frameline on a optical printer to the same position as the other materials. At the same time we made the new intertitles in the print as close as possible to the characters in the original text, and the dissolves and freeze-frames with the new, made credits in the intro, and thefade-ins and fade-outs from the sequences.

When all this was finished we start editing the negatives together, That means we made the duplicate negative from the Prague master, the blow-up negative from the 16mm G.E.H. print, the negative from the earlier preserved scenes, and the negative from the new made intro and intertitles. You can imagine the difficulty
in matching the contrasts of all these different sources.

When editing was done we had seven reels of black & white negative with a total length of 2170 meters. Now we could start grading (color timing - a way of matching the density and intensity of color from scene to scene. Editor ) to make a color positive print according to the color information we received from the G.E.H. The picture was exposed in black & white to the color print material, and in a second run in the printer we flashed the unexposed areas of the picture with the color as indicated, scene by scene on the right scene change in the right color. This system of printing is called the "Desmet color system" and is the most realistic reproduction of tinting and toning as it was done originally (between, roughly, 1900 and 1928  almost every motion picture released was tinted in colors: eg. blue for night, red for fire, green for jungles, sepia for day, Editor)

On the 28th of July we did send the new print to the G.E.H. in Rochester, New York, USA, so it took us a little bit more then two weeks to finish the first print (sometimes called a "first answer print" Editor), which will be screened on the 8th of August at the George Eastman House theater.

I hope that a lot of people will have the opportunity to see and enjoy this new restored version of "The Lost World," it is only sad that it was not possible to start this preservation from the original nitrate print, we could have avoided a lot of the photographed damages and scratches by wet-printing.
 

Johan Prijs
Technical Supervisor
Haghefilm Conservation b.v.
Amsterdam, Holland
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Restoration Diary
News from Ed Stratmann,
Supervisor of the Restoration for George Eastman House

11 September 1997

        [Editor's Note: The print of The Lost World shown in Rochester, NY was a "first answer print" - a kind of test print to make sure that everything is correct. So the restoration is a work-in-progress with details being cleaned up a little bit at a time as schedules and budget permit. Film restoration, as you may have noticed by now, is a painstaking and expensive process. A question was raised at the "premiere" about some footage that was previously found having been left out of the restoration. While this is not verified yet, it is one of the issues that Mr. Straatman mentions in his letter which follows].
 

"We are re-doing the new titles to match closer in font and point size to the original intertitles. We have the new proofs now, and I will be talking with the lab in Europe about a few typos and mistakes this morning.

"We have gone through and marked all the blank flash frames - to be removed from the material that came from the new Czech material.

"We have checked and re-ordered a few of the scenes.

"We are still checking and double checking to be sure that any scenes that may have been missed are returned or added. I do not have a definite answer that any were yet, but we are continuially checking."
 

14 July 1997
"I have been cutting together the work print and working with the labs to get the material ready and completed.

"There will be 53 new intertitles re-produced from the script in a font matching the existing intertitles.

All the material is at the lab."

19 May 1997
Ed S. reports that: "I am still working on the titles, this week producing samples of the fonts and titles to go into the film. We will match these with the existing titles for looks and with the story (script material) we have for accuracy."
7 May 1997
This week, Mr. Stratmann is working on the "intertitles." In a silent movie, there were "title cards" that described what characters in the story were saying or doing that was not obvious from the pantomimed action.

Since many of the original title cards were lost, they must be restored. In addition, the "new" footage has intertitles in Czech and these must be translated and compared to the original script for accuracy.

Ed is trying to match the type face of the original intertitles by using computer fonts. Then the new titles will look as close as possible to the original film.
 

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ANNOUNCEMENTS about the restoration.

29 July 1998  We won this swell award from Italy.
18 July 1997 WORLD PREMIERE The Restored 1925 The Lost World. Friday, August 8, 1997, 8PM George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, New York. (716) 271-3361, FAX (716) 271-3970 Tickets go on sale one hour before the showing. This showing will be of a visually complete film running approximately 108 minutes. There is, however, further work to be done on a musical score. A date for that version will be announced.
15 July 1997 The entire restoration is in the laboratory!
1 July 1997 Okay. It's official. Friday, August 8, 1997. Rochester, New York. George Eastman House. Admission $5.00, $4.00. The world premiere (tah dah!) of The Lost World Work-in-Progress! Details to follow, but the print will be almost complete with the absolutely final version to follow shortly. If you live in Rochester, call 'em up and reserve your tickets, NOW! Tell 'em The Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette sent you!

30 June, 1997 Cinefex Number 70, June 1997 (US$8.50) is available with Scott MacQueen's article Classic Restoration : The Lost World - Found! on page 143. Information: Cinefex, P.O. Box 20027, Riverside, CA 92516

30 June 1997 - The latest from George Eastman house is that there will be a "premiere" of a a version of the restored 1925 The Lost World on Friday, August 8, 1997 at the George Eastman House theatre in Rochester, New York. It's not quite clear exactly what will be shown, but we'll keep you informed!

6 June 1997 Leonard Maltin, Entertainment Tonight's film critic has written a wonderful article for Microsoft's Cinemania Online. You can read it in his InFocus Column. Thanks Leonard!

7 May 1997 Milestone Films, 275 West 96th Street, NY, NY has announced its intention to donate a number of copies of the VHS video of the best existing restoration of The Lost World which will be given to contributors of $100.00 or more (while they last). Details to follow.

Scott MacQueen, film preservationist, has written an article on the restoration which will appear in the upcoming issue (June, 1997)of CINEFEX magazine available by subscription and on the newstand. Mr. McQueen was instrumental in finding some of the missing footage and worked on the previous restoration.

Edward Summer has written an article on the restoration for the Spring, 1997 Volume 48, 3/4 issue of Films In Review magazine which is available by subscription and also on newsstands.