Speakers
Craig Barron
Craig Barron began his career at Industrial Light + Magic, where he worked on such classic films as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Barron’s visual effects company, Matte World Digital, conjured environments for such films as Titanic (1997), Zodiac (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Hugo (2011) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), for which he won the Academy Award for visual effects. Barron is an AMPAS lecturer, a TCM guest-host, and a University educator with a focus on the history and techniques of visual effects in classic studio films and the digital age. He’s featured in documentary supplements for several Criterion Blu-ray editions, demonstrating classic effects on films by Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Alfred Hitchcock, using computer animations. He co-authored with Mark Cotta Vaz the first book on the history of movie matte-painting, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting. Barron is the creative director at Magnopus, a visual development company specializing in Virtual and Augmented Reality in Los Angeles.
Nicholas Bergh
Nicholas Bergh received his B.A. and M.A. in ethnomusicology from UCLA where he specialized in the history of recording technology and sound archiving. During this time he was also fortunate to be mentored by engineers who worked in the earliest decades of optical sound, disc, and magnetic technologies. In 2000, he began his career in sound restoration, doing the re-mastering and digital restoration of numerous feature films for DVD distribution. It is here where he was confronted with the limitations of the analog work being done for even high-budget projects. In 2003, he started Endpoint Audio Labs in order to focus on improving the quality of film sound transfers before restoration. Endpoint has become known for both unique transfer technologies as well as using historical research to inform transfer decisions. Nicholas is a member of the AMPAS Sci-Tech Council Historical Sub-committee and is active in conserving motion picture sound artifacts. To learn more about Nicholas and the unique restoration work at Endpoint Audio Labs, please visit: www.endpointaudio.com.
Alan Boyd
Alan Boyd has been involved professionally with archival media for over 30 years, both with his personal collection of historical film (including a number of titles that have been preserved by UCLA), and his long association with The Beach Boys, managing their archival holdings and producing numerous compilations of their music for Capitol Records, Eagle Rock and Hallmark. In 2012 Alan received a Grammy Award for producing and compiling the highly acclaimed SMILE SESSIONS box set, and earlier he wrote, directed and edited a feature length documentary on the group, ENDLESS HARMONY, which was nominated for a Grammy in 2001. Alan has also worked extensively with the Grinberg Film Library, and the Mary Pickford Foundation, and provided a number of films from his collection for the Rigler Foundation / Classic Arts Channel. Alan, a graduate of the film school at NYU, also directed and/or edited several feature length music documentaries, including films on The Monkees, Marianne Faithfull, Brian Wilson, and Earth Wind and Fire.
Jason Brahms
Jason has 17+ years experience launching B2C and B2B platforms in the media/content industry. As CEO and Managing Partner at Video Gorillas (VG) Jason is responsible for defining and executing sales, marketing and product strategies across all VG products and services. Prior to VG, Jason was Vice President of Innovation and Advanced Solutions, where he oversaw product design, research, development and engineering for Sony Media Cloud Services cloud-based SAAS collaborative applications for creative professionals and content creators. Jason joined Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1998 starting in Corporate Development focusing on evangelizing and incubating ideas related to disruptive technology and new business models, including helping design, develop and launch the first IP VOD service, Movielink, where he assumed the role of Director of Content Acquisition and Operations. Jason has held multiple roles across various Sony business units since, including Director of Content for Playstation Network, Vice President, Technology and Operations for Sony Pictures, and Vice President, Advanced Platforms for Sony Pictures where he effectively worked as an “entrepreneur in residence” developing and evangelizing new production and post-production technology solutions. Jason is also a songwriter/music producer whose songs have been featured in numerous television series (e.g. Ugly Betty, Monk, ER, etc.).
Ben Burtt
Ben Burtt has more than 30 years of experience as a writer, director, film editor, sound designer and sound mixer. His work includes documentaries, network television movie specials, and educational, specialty and feature films.
Burtt started making films when age 10 in his backyard. He won 2 national student film awards for his aviation epic YANKEE SQUADRON and space film GENESIS. Burtt has a degree in Physics from Allegheny College and a Master’s Degree from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
Burtt received a Special Achievement Oscar for the creation of the alien, creature and robot voices featured in Star Wars (1977) and for Sound Effects Editing for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); he won Oscars for Sound Effects Editing for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). He also has earned nominations in the Sound Mixing category for Return of the Jedi (1983) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; in Sound Effects Editing for Return of the Jedi, Willow (1988) and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), and for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing for WALL-E (2008). Burtt is the voice of Pixar’s robot, Wall-E.
Burtt’s IMAX films as Director include Blue Planet, Destiny in Space, and Special Effects: Anything Can Happen, which was Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary. Some of Burtt’s credits as a feature film editor are Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Star Wars :Revenge of the Sith, and Red Tails. Burtt created special sound effects and montages for Star Trek (2009) and Wings (1927), and he served as sound designer and supervising sound editor on Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Munich, and Super 8 (2011). He recently did sound design for Lincoln (2012), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), The Signal (2014), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).
Also a film scholar, Burtt is a yearly presenter of programs for the Academy of Motion Pictures along with Craig Barron. The two of them have also hosted features on Turner Classic Movies’ broadcasts as well as the film festival.
Jaime Busby
Jaime Busby is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gotham Photochemical Laboratory. As a child actor and model during his pre-teens, he began a life-long love affair with film and a desire to become a Cinematographer at an early age. To achieve his dream, he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 14 to attend the Orange County School of the Arts. During the next four years, he focused his academic studies and hands on experience with an emphasis on Cinematography, film production, film editing, and photochemical processing with 16mm, 35mm, and 65mm film. By the time he was 18, he had purchased his own ARRICAM Studio 35mm production camera and had shot an impressive amount of film footage on all types of productions, including live and studio television. To further his education, he pursued a Cinematography degree at Brooks Institute of Photography.
After graduating from Brooks, Mr. Busby worked extensively as a Cinematographer and at several motion picture laboratories to obtain more hands-on experience with film laboratory processing. During this period he acquired expertise in the art of printing, scanning, restoration, and the preservation of motion picture film from the best film processing technologists in the film industry.
When Digital started to become more prevalent in the industry and several photochemical labs closed which resulted in a decrease in global competition within the film processing arena, Jaime saw this as an opportunity to create a hybrid film post production company focused on the preservation of film archives.
He began to collaborate with top film preservationists and technologists in designing a new Hybrid Photochemical and Digital laboratory in LA to support film services into the future. Mr. Busby has also spent over the last two years in the global search and acquisition of the latest film processing equipment needed to process, print, scan, record, and archive motion picture film. In addition, he has organized an experienced team of film experts who share his passion and desire for preserving archival film to partner with him in this business endeavor.
In December of 2015, Mr. Busby established Gotham Laboratory based on his life-long passion for Cinematography and film preservation. Gotham is currently offering film post production services focused on archival preservation.
Bruce Goldstein
Bruce is the founder and co-president of Rialto Pictures and Director of Repertory Programming at New York’s Film Forum. He started Rialto in 1997 as a way to exhibit classics that were not being distributed in the U.S. Since then, Rialto has re-released over 70 classics, including Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, Godard’s Contempt and Breathless, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, the original Japanese Godzilla, and Mel Brooks’ The Producers. Rialto now represents the Studiocanal catalogue of over 2000 American and European films.
In 1986, Goldstein created the now-iconic repertory program at New York’s Film Forum theater. Since then, Film Forum has become the nation’s flagship for new prints and restorations of classic movies. Goldstein has personally created over 400 film festivals, which are often emulated around the world. Time Out New York named Film Forum “New York’s Best Theater for Classic Films.”
Goldstein has also produced events for all of TCM’s film festivals and cruises. For the past several years, he’s helped kick off the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood with his own popular quiz show, “So You Think You Know Movies,” and has done popular talks on African-American dance legends The Nicholas Brothers, Pre-Code movies, character actors, vaudeville, subtitling and Godzilla – and presented William Castle’s The TIngler in “Percepto!”
At the 2013 festival, he re-created the missing soundtrack of Frank Capra’s first all-talkie, The Donovan Affair (1929), with a live cast of 10 actors (including himself). This sold-out show was named one of the two most popular events at that year’s festival. The following year, he presented it at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
Goldstein’s programming has been called “the Best of New York” by New York Magazine. In 1997, Time Out New York named Goldstein one of the 101 essential people or places of New York, citing him “for keeping showmanship alive,” and, in 2005, the same magazine dubbed him “New York’s Finest Film Programmer.” In its 2012 “Best of New York” issue, the Village Voice called him “the Michael Jordan of Film Programmers.” Kent Jones’ profile of Goldstein in Film Comment was entitled “The King of New York.” He has been profiled five times in The New York Times and twice in The New Yorker, among many other publications.
In 1990, the New York Film Critics Circle presented Goldstein with a special award “for consistent and imaginative quality programming of repertory films.” In 2002, he received the French Order of “Chevalier” of Arts & Letters. In 2007, he was honored by Anthology Film Archive for his work in film preservation. In 2009, he received the San Francisco Film Festival’s prestigious Mel Novikoff Award. In 2012, he was the recipient of the first Lifetime Achievement Award in Film ever given by George Eastman House.
In 2011, Dr. James Billington of the Librarian of Congress appointed Goldstein to the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB), which each year selects films for preservation in the Library of Congress.
Rialto’s latest release is a new restoration of Jean-Pierre Melville’s unseen When You Read This Letter…, starring Juliette Gréco, featuring new subtitles by Goldstein himself.
Andrea Kalas
Andrea is currently SVP Archives at Paramount Pictures. In addition to running the Archives at Paramount Andrea has been Head of Preservation at the British Film Institute, Digital Studio Director for Discovery Communications, Archivist for DreamworksSKG and preservationist and research database expert at UCLA Film and Television Archive. She is a member of the Academy and currently serves on the Science and Technology Council.
Elizabeth Kirkscey
Elizabeth Kirkscey supervises the music and audio preservation team at Paramount Pictures. A graduate of Northwestern University’s film program, she worked in physical production on features including SYRIANA and TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY before realizing that her experience in film and as a truly terrible cellist could be combined into an exciting career as a music archivist. She earned an MLIS from San Jose State University and has worked for the Paramount Archives since 2010.
Heather Linville
Heather Linville is the new Motion Picture Laboratory Supervisor at the Library of Congress’s National Audio Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA., where she oversees the Library’s photochemical and digital preservation operations. Previously she was a Film Preservationist at the Academy Film Archive for 14 years. In 2001 she received her masters in Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed training at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum in 2003.
Andy Maltz is the Managing Director of the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In this role, he is responsible for developing and implementing the Academy Science and Technology Council’s operational plan, administering the Council’s day-to-day operations, for individual contributions to selected Council initiatives and for representing the Academy on science and technology issues at industry, government and academic forums. Maltz co-authored The Digital Dilemma and The Digital Dilemma 2, the Academy’s landmark reports on long-term preservation of digital motion pictures and is the Project Director for the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES).
Previous to the Academy, Maltz was CEO of Avica Technology Corp., where he led the first worldwide commercial deployment of digital cinema servers, drove the development of key technologies for digital cinema, and was heavily involved with the digital releases of major motion pictures in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Previous to Avica, Maltz served as a consultant to companies such as Sharp Electronics and Microsoft, where he spearheaded the development of the Advanced Authoring Format. Prior, he was executive vice president of operations and engineering for nonlinear editing pioneer Ediflex Digital Systems.
Maltz served on the U. S. National Archives Public Advisory Committee for Electronic Records Archives for 8 years, is an associate member of the American Society of Cinematographers, and is a fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers where he serves on the SMPTE Journal Board of Editors. Maltz is also the incoming chairman of ISO TC36 – Cinematography, which sets international standards for the motion picture industry.
Anthony Matt
Anthony started his career in New York Vidipax in 1995 working part time while attending the School of Visual Arts. He then worked at Post Logic Studios NY as a film restoration artist, online editor and managing director. He is currently the executive director of cloud media services at Prime Focus Technologies in LA. He has worked on diverse range of projects from preservation, data migration, MAM implementations, film re-mastering, post production and production. He had the pleasure to work with Electronic Arts Intermix, Children’s Television Workshop, Coca Cola, David Bowie, The Criterion Collection, HBO, IFC Films, A&E, iTV productions, Warner Brothers and Sony Picture Entertainment and Les Blank Films. Anthony is also a part time documentary filmmaker, stereoscopic photographer and aspiring volcanologist.
Andrew Oran serves as VP Sales & Operations for FotoKem’s Large Format and Restoration Groups. Established in April 2004, the Large Format Group provides comprehensive lab, video and digital services for 65/70mm and mixed format film/digital projects. Recent films include the IMAX format documentaries “Journey to Space” and “National Parks”, and the feature films “The Hateful Eight” and “Interstellar”. FotoKem’s Restoration Group has produced 4K restorations on titles like “My Fair Lady” and “The Sound of Music”, and provides on-going film evaluation, repair, preservation and digitization services for Hollywood studios and archives nationwide.
Allen Perkins
Allen Perkins is a film technician at Metropolis Post. He is a 2017 certificate graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. He has interned at the Yale Film Study Center, Huntley Film Archives and University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections. On his own time, he creates simple workflows that drastically improve the faithfulness of recreated silent film intertitles.
Michael Pogorzelski
Michael Pogorzelski is currently the Director of the Academy Film Archive. He received his Bachelor’s and Master of Arts degrees in Film Studies (Communication Arts) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He began his career at the Academy Film Archive in 1996 and was named Director of the Archive in 2000. He has supervised and co-supervised the restoration and preservation of documentaries, experimental films, animated films as well as five Academy Award Best Picture winners. Most recently, he co-supervised the digital restoration of THE ROBE (1953), Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950) and THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943).
John Polito
John Polito has been at the forefront of digital sound restoration since its inception. After graduating in 1987 from Stanford University with honors in Music Composition and Digital Signal Processing, John joined Sonic Solutions and helped define the field by assisting in the development of the first digital audio workstation for sound restoration. In 1991 he started Audio Mechanics, which is one of the premier sound restoration facilities.
Davide Pozzi
Davide Pozzi has been working at Cineteca di Bologna since 2001, and in 2006 he became the director of L’Immagine Ritrovata film restoration laboratory. Under his management, the laboratory has established itself as one of the most highly specialized facilities in the field of film restoration worldwide. L’Immagine Ritrovata is exclusively specialized in film restoration and is equipped to cover every workflow, from 4K to photochemical. L’Immagine Ritrovata has two branches abroad, in Hong Kong (L’Immagine Ritrovata Asia) and Paris (L’Image Retrouvée). L’Immagine Ritrovata is one of the main organizers of the FIAF Film Restoration Summer School, which has been taking place in Bologna since 2007. The school has been also hosted in Singapore (November 2013), Mumbai (February 2015) and Buenos Aires (March 2017).
Dr. Wolfgang Ruppel is a digital technology expert and consultant with more than 20 years of experience in broadcast and media. Dr. Ruppel’s recent work includes software development of enhanced IMF tools and workflow automation utilizing Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS) and competitive queuing software for digital transfers and post production workflows.
Dr. Ruppel serves as a consultant to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences towards standardization of a new archival format based on IMF and the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES). Dr. Ruppel is a member of the European CEN/TC 457 committee on Digital preservation of cinematographic works.
Dr. Ruppel holds a professorship for Media Technology at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany since 2006. Prior to 2009, Dr. Ruppel served as Head of T-Systems Development of Digital Cinema servers and satellite distribution platform. He spent 14 years with Research & Development units of Deutsche Telekom. Dr. Ruppel is a member of: SMPTE, ITG and FKTG. He has worked with leading media companies and studios across North America and Europe. Dr. Ruppel earned a B.S. degree in 1989 and a Ph.D. degree in Engineering in 1994 from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.
Jakub Stadnik
Jakub Stadnik – sound engineer for film and television, an academic teacher at the Sound Engineering Department of the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, where he is preparing his doctoral thesis on audio restoration (awarded a doctoral scholarschip of Polish Film Institute, 2014). He is also a co-inventor of the IMAGE TO SOUND TOOLS (ITST) system for decoding sound-on-films from high-resolution scans. Since 2011 he has restored audio for 15 pre-war feature films (digitized with ITST) within a framework of the project named: “Conservation and digitalization of pre-war feature films at the National Film Archive in Warsaw” (abbr. “Nitrofilm”) led by the National Film Archive-Audiovisual Institute in Warsaw.
Paul Stambaugh
Paul Stambaugh is Senior Vice President North America for Prasad Corporation and Digital Film Technology LLC. Paul has spent 50 years in the Television, Film and Video Post Production Business, working for companies like Pathe’ Laboratories, MGM, Consolidated Film Industry(CFI), Ascent Media, Technicolor and Prasad/DFT. Paul was instrumental in creating the restoration department for CFI and merging this department into Technicolor’s restoration department.
Laurel Warbrick
In her 20-year film and television career, Laurel has worked for brands as diverse as Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies, HBO and the British Film Institute. She has overseen digital restorations and remastering of hundreds of titles including cult classics from Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and John Landis, early works of Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and Stephen Frears, as well as the March of Time collection and iconic television series such as The Wire. Laurel is currently Director of Remastering and Alternate Version at HBO and is based in New York City.
Alex Zhukov
Alex is a founder and currently serving as CTO of Video Gorillas, a patented innovator in the image analysis field and an avid skydiver. With a degree in Computer Science from the most reputable University in Ukraine and multiple professional certifications from Cisco, Oracle/Sun and HP, Alex has five published patents and two more currently in development. For the past thirteen years Alex has been successfully developing start-ups, and his extraordinary technical leadership and ability to innovate is trusted by companies like Sony Pictures Entertainment, Viewdle/Bloomberg and many others. Alex is located in the Kiev office of Video Gorillas with DevOps team and California.