Wow - progress, progress. So where to start...?!?
The effort to recover the live action footage from TWFNO is completed. John Lamb and camera man, Garrett Lamb, made the looong trek from Los Angeles, California to Boston, Massachusetts via red-eye to the only person known who 1) has a working Lyon Lamb VAS on premise, and 2) has the masterful skill set needed to pull the remaining images off 35 year-old film.
John is slowly slogging through the hours of recovered footage to timestamp and log each section that is noteworthy and acceptably clear. Some footage is gorgeous. (Unfortunately, other footage is little more than white noise - which is pretty much what we knew to anticipate.)
The recovery process itself turned out to be an epic feat. The film was infested with mold and the cleaning process entailed over 36 hours of manual effort with custom chemical treatment specially designed by the recovery master himself, John Fede.
John Fede of Audio Video Recovery Services, with John Lamb, in Natick, MA.
According to Fede, recovering film is a soon-to-be lost art. When pressed, John admitted he is the youngest guy at his company and he has no proteges. John preps and repairs all his equipment; the mold removal process and chemical mixtures were created by John and his mentors - there is no manual to read, and no school to teach what they have learned over decades. We were so fortunate to get the TWFNO tapes into his facility, it's hard to overstate.
So when Lamb presented our stack of tapes, Fede took a look, said "holy cow, we've got some work to do" and immediately got to cleaning. Three days later, there was footage to view, which Garrett got some photos of:
One of the originals. Time to roll the tape...!
Viewing TWFNO live action footage for the first time in decades.
There's still much more work to do on prepping the footage to share with the Kickstarter backers. All the footage wasn't this clear, but John's excited about what he's seen so far, and we look forward to sharing it once we have the book is completed.
So what about the book?
The first draft was just completed and is being uploaded (right now) for the editing team to review. After first draft editing is completed, we anticipate additional review and edits with a test print in August. Based on that timeline, we're realistically looking at sending out for final printing in September.
For those who ordered the bundles, we expect to ship in late September or early October! Holy cow, time flies.