Save Your Archive with Partners - Pitching Room @ IASA FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference 2020
This project involves retrieving archive footage towards mainly three important collections, as well as ancillary projects. These are stories that are highly significant as they provide an understanding of community story-telling after COVID and in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement. It requires retrieving data from different formats: Beta SP, D1 and D2 Tapes, and 1/4 inch reels.
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Scottish Reverend Sidney Pearson, who built an African Eton: https://medium.com/@viewmagazine/black-lives-historical-friendships-and-indelible-legacies-in-ghana-dde3786f9282 (co-produced with Michael Donkor)
We estimate digitising the 30 min Beta SP tapes, which is the only recording of the Reverend; a trailer was made here (https://vimeo.com/1127402) through digitising limited media twenty years ago, perhaps up to 30 SP tapes or more would need to be checked This would be the equivalent of 12- 15 hours
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South-West Africa Broadcast Legacy: https://twitter.com/viewmagazine/status/1271849218261606402
The second collection involves archive from the first Ghana-S. Africa co production and has historical purpose. That involved D1 tapes. Six of them plus around 10 30 Beta SPs This would be the equivalent of 6-9 hours Ancillary to this our tapes of stories in 1994 when David worked at Channel ONE. We believe some of these tapes, like the Marchioness disaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchioness_disaster), are historically significant.
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Black London in the 1990s: a typical example https://soundcloud.com/david-dg/eartha-mae-kitt
The third collection involves 1/4 inch reels from 1992 for one of the pioneering shows on the BBC called Black London. Some of the archive has been retrieved and includes material from Fela Kuti, Eartha Kitt, Alice Walker, Quincy Jones etc. This is more difficult to gauge as the reels vary from 60 minute reels to 10 minutes, but a guestimate would be around 50 hours.