Allie Whalen, National Film Archive, Summer 2014
My internship at Národní filmový archiv (the National Film Archive) included a wide array of projects from film inspection to film festivals to working with databases. My main projects included working on different film restoration and digitization tasks along with several more research focused projects and attendance at two film festivals that NFA actively participates in, Il Cinema Ritrovato and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. I had the opportunity to work on a large digitization project of 10 Czech cinema classics and assist with the first phase of the project that included inspection of the original negative, original negative soundtrack, and a duplicate positive print. Together with my supervisor, we developed an English-Czech technical film dictionary with illustrations and a film inspection worksheet. I helped with photochemical restoration projects conducting color comparisons between nitrate originals and photochemically colored prints. I assisted in the Sound Recordings Division on a current digitization project of the Czech oral history collection. I also had the chance to attend two established and unique film festivals in Italy and the Czech Republic that gave me the opportunity to witness the presentation and programming side of film archiving and restoration, meet with international moving image archivists and restorers, and learn about how international archives are participating and collaborating to provide access.
