Unlocking Film Heritage was one of the biggest filmdigitisation projects ever undertaken and it encompassed the BFI National Archive together with national and regional audiovisualarchival institutions in United Kingdom. Between 2013-2017 around 10,000 titles, capturing 120 years of Great Britain on film, were digitised and made free-to-access in a variety of ways. Many archival clips can be watched for free online via BFI Player.
Unlocking Film Heritage (UFH)
feared that the UK’s audiovisual heritage was in danger of being stranded in the analogue domain and forever inaccessible to the people of Britain. So they made a five year plan - Film Forever: Supporting UK Film 2012-2017 in order to remedy this. BFI consulted and collaborated with commercial facilities, national and regional archives as well as commercial rights holders to establish, harmonise and document technical standards and requirements for preservation and access. Aided by National Lottery funding, the Unlocking Film Heritage Digitisation Fund was launched in 2013. The goal of the programme was to ensure that researchers, film-makers, outreach programmes and the general public easier can access the British intangible cultural heritage. In order to achieve this investments were done in preservation, digitisation and interpretation of audiovisual archival material. The content of the material spans from urban architecture to rural landscapes, from festivals to schools, from local people to famous visitors etc. Around 10,000 titles were digitised and have been documented within the BFI collections information database and the majority are free-to-watch as part of Britain on Film and other themed collections on BFI Player, a webpage developed for within the project. Public access was extended further through social media, theatrical, broadcast and home entertainment releases on Blu-ray and DVD. The UFH project was one of the largest and most complex archive preservation projects undertaken in UK and it won the award for Best Archive Preservation Project at the FIAT/IFTA world conference in Warsaw 2016. A jury of international experts were impressed by the highly collaborative nature of the UFH project, where expertise and commercial service providers from all of UK nations and regions participated. They jury also praised the new technologies and processes invented and used, where the aim was not only to care for the archival collections but also to make them accessible to a digitally connected world.
Participants in the UFH project
The following organisations participated in the project;
East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA)
This regional film archive was one of the first in UK, established in the 70s as a repository for the regions audiovisual heritage. More than 150 hours of archive film footage from EAFA was made made available during the UFH project. The content depicts Norfolk life and includes scenes from Cromer and Caister in the 1930s, a visit by George Formby to the region in 1949, actress Joyce Grenfell in King’s Lynn in 1961, the K Shoe factory workers protest of 1976 and the Singing Postman.
SASE contributed with about 400 films and material is a mixture of publicity films, amateur films, local news films, films originally designed as public records, industrial films, advertisements, short fiction and animation.
WFSA contributed with about 80 films and the material is a mixture of publicity films, amateur films, local news films, films originally designed as public records, industrial films, advertisements, short fiction and animation.
