“Virtual bench: a hybrid research and computation platform for digital surrogates of motion picture films”

FAIN: PR-284350-22

University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)
Greg Wilsbacher (Project Director: May 2021 to present)
Song Wang (Co Project Director: March 2022 to August 2022)
Jun Zhou (Co Project Director: March 2022 to present)

A Tier II project to develop two specialized open-source software tools, Virtual Bench Research Platform and Virtual Bench Compute, for improving the preservation and material study of digitized film.

Motion picture film is more than an image. While the history of cinema provides ample evidence that the film industry from its beginnings strove to promote the illusion of an immaterial presence illuminating a screen in a darkened theater, the reality of film’s physical presence rolled through projectors in booths, weighed down shipping containers as it was shuttled from one theater to another, and fell to the cutting room floor during editing. The residue of a century of filmmaking (theatrical and non-theatrical, professional and amateur, documentary and fiction, news and nonsense) now resides in film archives once or twice removed from the industries and communities that produced the content. How this large collective archive will live on to be studied by scholars of the future remains a question without a satisfactory answer. The University of South Carolina seeks a $349,106 award to fund a two-year project that will push the boundaries of possibility for scholarly access to motion picture film elements surviving in film archives. We propose a two-pronged project that will demonstrate the inherent value of digitizing the entirety of a film element, known as a full overscan, to create a digital surrogate of the material motion picture film object.