Newswire

FOCAL International is offering early bird tickets for its annual FOCAL Awards night in London. The event, now in its 22nd year, celebrates the best use of archival footage across the creative and cultural industries. The awards also acknowledge leading archive restoration and preservation work, as well as the people and companies that make up the industry. The event will be held in the heart of London at Church House, Westminster, on June 19.

Historic Films Archive is newly partnering with London-based Mercury Studios/UMG. The deal gives the Greenport NY footage house unlimited access to Mercury's more than 2000 hours of music-first content that includes over 200 titles of genre-defining documentaries, television and film.

London-based Orchard Clips has signed a multi-year representation agreement with Lebanon-based content library TRIARC. The agreement sees Orchard Clips take on footage from TRIARC’s collections of contemporary stock footage clips from across the Middle East. The collection spans a number of themes, including urban and modern development, culture and heritage, and the natural world.

Getty Images’ Chief Ex Craig Peters has described the company’s merger deal with royalty free house Shutterstock as “transformational for our companies.” The deal is reported to have created an enterprise valued at approximately $3.7 billion and as such is the “giant” of the visual media licensing world.. The company’s combined annual revenue is around $2bn, with 46% coming from subscriptions.

Trade association FOCAL International that stages an annual awards process says submissions are now open for the Production, Restoration and Preservation categories in its 2025 programme, and for the Researcher of the Year award, named after the late Jane Mercer. The awards ceremony will be held in London in June next year. Submissions for the Footage Company of the Year and Footage Person of the Year categories will be open for entry on 21 January 2025.

An influential figure in the stock footage world, David Seevers has died aged 58 after a battle with cancer. David, who was for over ten years Chief Marketing Officer for Footage.net, was the author significant reports on the industry, the four editions of ACSIL’s Global Survey of Stock Footage Companies, the last published in 2019. David was a former head of ABC Library Sales, was an Executive Director of FOCAL and through his consultancy Thriving Archives worked with a range of companies and organisations in the sector.

Footage house Historic Films has acquired rights to market clips from the tv program ‘Camera Three’, said to be America’s top anthology arts program in the 25-years it was on air. Launched in 1956, ‘Camera Three’ showcased drama, ballet, art, music, film, literature and anything involving fine arts. It included live performances and hundreds of celebrity interviews. It began as a Sunday afternoon local program on WCBS-TV in New York before moving to the network on CBS, and later to PBS. The material is currently in the process of being scanned and digitized from the original kinescopes and tape masters.

In a deal with The Baim Collection, UK-based Orchard Clips has taken on a selection of films shot across Jordan, Lebanon and Israel between 1961 and 1973 and packaged them up for clip sales. Harold Baim was a director, writer and prolific producer of 35mm short features for UK cinema release. Sometimes called ‘quota-quickies’, these films included colourful widescreen travelogues. Bain died in 1996.

The recipient of this year’s The FOCAL International Lifetime Achievement Award is Eric Land Kulberg, Owner/Partner at Washington-based research and clearance company Universal Media, Inc.The award is gifted each year by the FOCAL International executive board to an individual who has contributed to and supported the audiovisual archive industry within their career and through the body of work . Eric began working in television in 1961 at the age of 16 at KTVA, the CBS affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska. In his career, Eric produced programming for domestic and international outlets as well as directed and edited hundreds of commercials and political advertisements, including the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter Presidential campaigns. For the last 27years, Eric’s company has been has been clearing music, footage, photos and guilds for documentaries, film playbacks, infomercials and other media users.

The UK’s Sky TV has a new web presence covering a host of what it calls “content services,” including its well-established clip sales division. The footage licensing team offers news, sport and entertainment material from more than 20 years of coverage.

The ITN Archive has unearthed an extensive and rare interview with legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow. Working with London film lab and digital facility Cinelab. The vinegar-syndromed film interview has been unseen since broadcast in 1958, and covers early opinions on LBJ, JFK, UK/US relations, the H bomb and a host of anecdotes. ITN footage is licensed through Getty Images.

The latest official figures published by the British Film Institute’s Research and Statistics Unit show that in a year in which film and high-end TV production was impacted globally by the Hollywood strikes and a tv advertising drop-off, it continued to generate billions to the UK economy. The combined spend by film and high-end television production during 2023 reached £4.23 billion, 32% down on 2022 but almost level with pre-pandemic levels.

The organisers of the FOCAL International Awards that is scheduled to be held the on June 20 at London’s Church House in Westminster have revised submissions deadlines in some categories. The new deadline for the production, researcher and restoration and preservation categories is February 28. The trade body's awards honour the exceptional use of archival footage across creative sectors.

New York Stock Exchange-listed royalty free house Shutterstock has announced an 11 per cent increase in the dividend paid to shareholders. Giving details, the directors say the new dividend of $0.30 per share is an increase of three cents per share on the previous award, adding that the increase is representative of “the growth we have experienced in our operating profitability and cash flow”. Shutterstock markets a collection of 52 million video clips alongside a holding of photos and other media.

New Jersey-based Global Image Works has a new-look website and has introduced an archive of audio recordings that includes over 300 interviews with figures from the world of rock, soul and pop including music executives, engineers and record producers, the earliest from the 1890s. The privately-owned archive says the new web interface integrates search capabilities through footage, photos and audio collections.

Adobe’s image subscription service, previously dominated by High Definition footage, has added 15 million 4K videos. The subscription service starts at $30 a month for an annual plan, a deal that gives publication access to 10 images a month.

Britain’s Channel Four TV is reported to be laying off 15 per cent of its staff, some 250 employees, and has reduced its programming budget, in the face of a major drop off in tv advertising. Its chief executive says the industry is in “market shock” territory. The channel that is Government-owned but funded by advertising reports an income drop off of between 8pc and 9pc last year compared with the previous year.

The owner of footage house Storm Stock, Martin Lisius, drives an Acura MDX SUV when storm chasing to add material to his ever increasing holding of weather footage. In August last year he completed a self-produced video commercial about the vehicle, a work entitled Acura MDX “Storm Chaser”. Now he has won the award for Best Commercial at the World Film Festival at Cannes.

US footage house Historic Films has a new-look website that the company says is “streamlined, technically more efficient and visually more appealing” than its predecessor. Historic’s Anthea Carr worked with Adam Putter and his team at Bad Math in Toronto over the the design and usability aspects. New features include the ability to export research data structured for use in project spreadsheets, search results that use language understanding to correct misspellings and keyword autocomplete giving users a list of similar result possibilities.

London-based Orchard Clips, which specialises in footage from and about the Middle East and North Africa, has a new content marketing agreement with Veritone, Inc., an innovative technology company designing what it describes as “human-centred AI solutions”. Orchard says the deal will “enhance content licensing opportunities in North and South America.”