Matthew Hoffman, Third World Newsreel, Spring 2019
From January to May 2019, I completed an internship at Third World Newsreel. As an archival intern, it was my job to assist in film inspection, grant writing, and database work. Third World Newsreel had just received 16mm prints belonging to a former friend of Newsreel. In order to enter the prints into the database, identification and inspection were required. I examined the prints on rewinds, before my supervisor and I travelled to the NYPL Performing Arts library on multiple occasions to view the films on a Cinescan. During these visits, we also viewed materials for the film Summer ’68 which TWN has been in the process of trying to preserve. I assisted my in writing the NFPF grant for the preservation of this film. In this process, I also reached out to scholars for quotes to use in the grant, and fortunately was able to get a very helpful quote from scholar Bill Nichols. Other grant work involved offering input and edits for the CLIR grant submitted towards the beginning of my internship. I also managed the FileMaker Pro database throughout my internship. This included importing the spreadsheet of films being stored at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research (WCFTR). This required me to split the spreadsheet from WCFTR into two separate spreadsheets, one for films with production files already created in the database, and one for films that did not exist in the database in any form. Then I completed a complicated import process to get this information into the FileMaker database. Other database work involved entry of the Roz Payne films into the database and a continued contribution to the FileMaker Pro database user guide.
Matthew Hoffman interned Third World Newsreel in Spring 2019.
