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Small-town Sask. film processor gets photo development requests from around the world

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  • Small-town Sask. film processor gets photo development requests from around the world

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saska...tion-1.5429355

    Photos taken on film are meant to last but when they're forgotten about and sit undeveloped, especially for a long period of time, it gets trickier to recover those memories.
    That's where Greg Miller, of Film Rescue International in Indian Head, Sask., steps in.


    Film Rescue International, based out of Indian Head, Sask., is one of the few businesses around the world that offers film restoration work, according to Miller. (Bryan Eneas/CBC)


    "It's great work. We've never got rich doing this work, but we've always been highly entertained," Miller said.

    The stories customers tell him tend to be similar: a family member died, then they go through their belongings and old rolls of undeveloped film are discovered.


    Miller says Film Rescue International also offers high-quality scanning services to their customers. (Bryan Eneas/CBC)


    Sometimes, the photos are "a bit naughty" or sexually explicit, but Miller said, for the most part, family members are excited to see them and rarely ask for those to be withheld in their final package of images. He noted the company is intensely private the images they process, so they can't accidentally be leaked.


    Film Rescue International digitizes video cassettes for customers, although Miller notes it is becoming more and more challenging to find quality VCRs to do that kind of work. (Bryan Eneas/CBC)


    Because regular film processing labs, which are increasingly rare, don't always have the right chemicals or materials to process those rolls of undeveloped film, this business 70 kilometres east of Regina, fills that niche.

    When he started the business in 1999, Miller would get two or three phone calls a week from prospective customers.

    That changed when he was put on Kodak's referral list; he then started to receive 20 to 30 calls a day.


    Miller, who worked as a movie film processor in Toronto before he purchased the old bank building at 500 Grand Ave. in Indian Head, Sask. in 1999 and launched Film Rescue International. (Bryan Eneas/CBC)


    Miller said the company has worked with film dating as far back as the 1920s, and has done work with various law enforcement agencies, two presidential libraries, the Smithsonian Institution and for customers from around the world.

    "It's opening time capsules for a living, basically," Miller said.

    "That's fun work. To this day, I love the job. I like getting up in the morning and seeing what we'll discover."


    What used to be a bank vault was converted into this work space, where movie film is processed. (Bryan Eneas/CBC)


    In particular, Miller said he enjoys working with old, high-quality photo negatives. He said they're similar to antiques, and he likes seeing how careful people were about taking photographs because they were expensive and more difficult to make.

    Miller said the company is working to future-proof his business. The company is relaunching its website soon, and it will be shining a light on the business's film scanning and archive digitization services as well as their film recovery work.


    Miller said initially he questioned the decision to move to small town Saskatchewan to start his business but has come to love life out of the big city. (Bryan Eneas/CBC)


    He said it's not always the most exciting work, but it's work that will keep the business alive as there becomes less and less old film to process.

    "We're always trying to innovate and do that type of work better than other people," Miller said.
    The photos seem to have got copied into here along with the article so hopefully this will just work.

  • #2
    Rocky Mountain Film Lab is another company that specializes in obsolete photochemical processes, including the ones that involve seriously gnarly chemistry, e.g. E-4 and C-22.

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    • #3
      I've never used either company, but both have excellent reputations for being able to recover images on old film.

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      • #4
        I actually used Film Rescue International a few years back when my brother found a nearly fifty year old roll of Ektachrome E-4 process film in his garage. They turned it around within about a month. Of course, the dye layers were long since gone, and the negative strips themselves look blank, but they got a marginal b/w image out of it, photos of family around Christmas 1970. I recommend them.

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        Rocky Mountain Film Lab is another company that specializes in obsolete photochemical processes
        While Leo means well in posting this, DO NOT send these people your film. They have been in and out of bankruptcy many times, and at one point they had a ten-year backlog of film to process, where they had cashed the checks and ignored the work. Their website hasn't been updated in years. Check their on-line reviews for a real horror show.
        Last edited by Mark Ogden; 01-20-2020, 03:13 PM.

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        • #5
          Thanks for the heads-up. I heard about them from someone who had sent a couple of unprocessed Kodak Disc films from the 1980s to them, and was very satisfied with the service she received. However, this was about four years ago, so I guess that they must have gotten into financial difficulties since then.

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          • #6
            I hadn't heard about that, either. Good to know.

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            • #7
              It's funny to see a picture of the exact same SVHS deck we're currently using, after the last Sony SVP-5600 gave up on us.

              The amount of content still only on dead formats like VHS or Hi8 is still pretty astonishing. Not everything is worth salvaging though.

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