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2024 FOCAL Awards 2024 Winners & Nominees

Company of the Year

2024 Winner

Getty Images

Archival highlights

The EMEA Broadcast and Production team supported over 1,800 film and TV productions in 2023 across a variety of factual and scripted genres.

Getty Images offer key services to customers including Proof of Concept - free, content research feeding video and stills findings from our libraries back to customers. This service was used extensively in 2023, helping shape the viability or direction of over 3,000 projects.

To help deliver on the Getty Images mission of “keeping the customer at the heart of everything we do” an Advisory Group of notable, experienced archive researchers was created. This group ensures Getty Images continue to listen to what customers need and to provide the enhancements and improvements they request into the future.

September 2023 saw the re-launch of the much-improved VIDA platform collaboration between Getty Images and BBC Studios, giving access to BBC archive video and a new seamless search, purchase and download experience. The improved platform has met with overwhelmingly positive customer reaction, and to help onboarding, Getty Images ran an extensive VIDA webinar and various support activities.


Shortlisted

Prasad

Archival highlights

We are motivated by the tremendous strides our team has taken in establishing 8K as a cutting-edge service offering in the Indian market. Worldwide, 8K has not become mainstream yet. But in India, we strongly believed that we could crack this puzzle. It was just not about taking this service to market but a major operation struggle to scan at 8K. We faced technical issues, issues, challenges relating to scanning, film compatibility, and data storage. The Prasad team had to constantly innovate and bring in several improvements to the hardware and software to optimize performance.

Prasad physically restore and prepare deteriorating cultural and historical treasures to be ‘preserved4posterity™’. This is probably one of the largest Analog Film Restoration and Preventive Conservation project executed in the world. The ambitious project involved restoring approximately 60,000 reels, which accounted for about one-third of the archive's inventory. To achieve this, a combination of technologies, processes, and innovative thinking was employed on a large scale.

In addition, they launched two new services in 2023:
Film Colorization Services:
Bringing in expertise in film preservation, they launched black-and-white film colorization services.

SDR to HDR conversion services: The consumer demand for high-quality video entertainment had surged in recent times. HDR is gradually becoming ubiquitous in the general streaming space.

Kinolibrary

Archival highlights

Kinolibrary is the perfect combination of the key facets exhibited by the best archive companies. Crucially, they have excellent material that is unique, high quality and easily accessible but they are also a lovely group of people offering excellent boutique service in their research, sales and in representing film-makers and licensors. They have also brought new talent into the industry who have since gone on to successful careers in production. I can’t think of another company that compares in such an all-round contribution to our sector.

In 2023, Kinolibrary released a new website providing users with more visibility on the collections that Kinolibrary hold. The site was built and designed with direct input from archive researchers and producers and provides a searchable database of curated clips from across the Kinolibrary collections.

In addition, Kinolibrary has continued to add high quality and exclusive content to their evolving archive, much of which has been made commercially available for the first time. These recent collections include underground LBGTQ nightlife in the 1990s, the Miner's strikes of the 1980s, the Irish Troubles from the 1970s and the UK 1960s art scene. They also completed scanning the Oscar-winning Hilary Harris' 35mm reel collection featuring beautiful scenes and communities from New York in the 1960s and 1970s