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01.06.12 MusicWeek 23


IT WAS ALL YELLOW... A DELICATE RESTORATION


John, Paul, George and Ringo have never looked as good as they do now in Yellow Submarine and it is all thanks to Triage Motion Pictures Services, a Los Angeles-based company specialising in film preservation and restoration. Its owner and artistic director Paul Rutan Jr spoke to Music Week about the job he and his team did for Apple Corps, one which delicately and painstakingly involved restoring the film by hand, frame by frame.


“They really have gone to the premier house in


Los Angeles that does film restoration and they’ve done it frame by frame, not all of it hand-tinted, but it’s digitally redone in 4K [resolution]. You would expect nothing else from Apple [Corps],” says Hayden of the work undertaken by Paul Rutan Jr and his team at Triage Motion Picture Services and Eque Inc. “We’re just giving something people have always


loved a freshen-up,” he adds. “It’s like cleaning a painting. You can appreciate it all over again.” As part of the exclusive deal signed in 2010,


iTunes remains at present the only place where The Beatles’ catalogue is available digitally and as such the retailer will be a big part of this rollout with the film available on the site in HD and standard definition and for rental (a first for the Fab Four), while ringtones and alert tones will also be issued. Hayden adds: “Through linking their social


messaging and marketing with our social messaging and marketing we’ll definitely be reaching a wider college than just the Beatles fans. The idea of some of the games and some of the card things is they’ll be sociable enough that people will be able to forward them on and bring new people in and send onto friends, so hopefully there will be a growth element on that.” In a tie-up with The Times and its Times Plus


subscribers, a special screening of the movie took place at BAFTA in London’s Piccadilly last week, while other screenings are happening elsewhere globally, including around 200 in the US. Accompanying the film release will be a reissue


of the Yellow Submarine Songtrack, which was first made available in 1999 and differed from the existing Yellow Submarine album in that it dropped George Martin’s score and instead included all the Beatles tracks featured in the film. The tracklisting therefore combines cuts like Hey Bulldog and It’s Only A Northern Song, which debuted in the movie, with tracks from elsewhere in the group’s catalogue, such as Eleanor Rigby and Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. Other Beatles projects are already lined up for


the rest of the year but, depending what happens with the regulators, Yellow Submarine could be the last one EMI does before Universal owns it. However that turns out, though, Hayden notes with The Beatles’ company Apple Corps under chief executive Jeff Jones driving activity there will be absolute continuity. “That’s the fantastic thing for The Beatles.


Whatever happens they’ll have their team and they’re the people who keep the ball rolling and the projects coming. Wherever The Beatles end up and whoever is working with them it will be a seamless transition,” he says.


How did your involvement with Yellow Submarine come about? I’d done A Hard Day’s Night and also Help! so that meant we were in the running for Yellow Submarine and we had spoken with Jonathan Clyde at Apple and told him we could scan it 4K and he liked that idea a lot so he knew he could trust me.


Given Yellow Submarine is an animated movie and the other two Beatles films you worked on real life did that present different challenges? Yes, we had a problem with [Yellow Submarine] when we tried to apply some of the tools we have for automated dirt clean-up. It would take out line work from the image so we couldn’t do that. The biggest challenge was that we couldn’t use even the slightest bit of automated dirt clean-up so we had to go through each frame to clean up whatever dirt was on it and whatever defects we found. The other thing was to determine what was supposed to be there and what wasn’t.


What difference did not being able to do any automation make to the length of the project? It took a lot of time. We were on fast track on it, but we had 40 people working on it to clean it up.


That sounds a lot. Is that typical? That’s a lot for an animated feature, but the other thing was with the people we were working with was to keep the integrity of the picture; that was really important. We could have easily have turned it into Japanese animation.


Watching this restored version makes it look like a brand new movie. What are you yourself picking up in terms of the job


‘Every frame is painted, every cell is painted’: Rutan believes Yellow Submarine is up there with the early Disney animations


Diamonds sequence with John. It’s an incredible piece of art and I like that and the headland sequence because of the colour and I like Nowhere Man.


Artistically where do you think this movie ranks? A lot of top film makers say it was an important film in the way it pushed forward animation. Is that


“It looks better than it did when it was released in 1968... It’s a brand


new film basically, although we did keep the artistic intent” PAUL RUTAN JR, TRIAGE


you and your team have done? We did a great job on it, I think. We worked really hard. We were passionate about the work we were doing and, because it was going to a brand new medium which is the Blu-ray, we wanted it to look better than it ever has so it was a two-step process. The first step was to restore the picture and the second step was to remaster it, which is to make it look better. It looks better than it did when it was released in 1968 so in my opinion if it looks better than it did how can it be a restoration? It’s a brand new film basically, although we did keep the artistic intent. We kept everything we possibly could that indicated it was a work of art and not the work of a computer- generated image.


Are there parts of the movie you think that stand out more now because of the work you and your team have done? I really, really like the Lucy In The Sky With


something you would agree with? Absolutely. I think it’s right up there with the early Disney films as far as the ground- breaking material and they also don’t make cartoons like that anymore. Every frame is painted. Every cell is painted. They had 200 artists working on that film for 11 months.


Do you imagine this reissue will be one way of getting another generation into The Beatles? Definitely, but as cartoon characters. We need to get more live action out there again because if the kids see it they’ll see The Beatles as cartoon characters.


Was there any consultation with any of the people who worked on the original movie? Oh definitely. We worked with Bob Balser and I know Jonathan [Clyde] worked with some of the original animators in England. Bob is 85 years old and is as sharp as a razor. He was director of animation so he has the whole story.


Have there been many other music projects you’ve worked on? No, most of the material is motion pictures anywhere from the 1890s to the 1980s. We did The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We did Alfie, quite a few films, but not many musicals, unfortunately.


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