How JM Film Resins Owners Preserve Old Film Reels Through Art – The Hollywood Reporter

Instead of letting old film reels accumulate and gather dust in warehouses, Jesse Brent and his wife, Michelle Sloey, decided to give new life to these films and make art out of them, which in turn puts the film back on display for the world to see.

The duo, who collaborate under the company name JM Film Resins, found a film from Movies like The Wizard of Oz (in Technicolor), Pulp Fiction, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, My Cousin Vinnie, The Devil Wears Prada, Gladiator, The Graduate … Basically whatever movie you like, they’ll have made a piece of resin art out of it.

“Every movie we find is a real treasure,” says Brent. Hollywood Reporter. “Every time, it’s like a little miracle.”

The pair take prints, either as long as one second or one or two seconds depending on the size of the work, coat them in resin to prevent the ink from further oxidizing, and sell their art pieces at local markets.

Brent and his wife’s background is deeply rooted in cinema history. Both are from Rochester, New York, a home base for Kodak’s major facilities; Brent explains that many of their family members have run assembly lines over the years to make the movie that came to Hollywood. A cinematographer, with an emphasis on helicopter cinematography for Wolfe Air Aviation, Brunt has done contract work for high-end aerospace companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, and has also worked on high-profile commercials (such as during the Super Bowl) and music videos for Taylor Swift. And Harry Styles.

He has also worked on films for Netflix as well as independent features, such as American dresser. Sloe, who knows the art department world, was in St. Petersburg, Florida, in March 2020, working as a costume designer on the comedy Spring Break, which is currently still in pre-production, when she met Brant, who was the director of photography for the feature. She moved to California later that year, and the two have been “making magic ever since.”

Brent credits the digital revolution for a large part of how he got involved in the industry. With the 2007 writers’ strike and the evolution of digital cameras, he became involved with companies that were driving new film production with digital cinematography. With his background working with cinema and having just graduated from film school, he says he understood the craft to shoot films in a new and revolutionary way.

“Early in the digital world, when you think about Hollywood starting to go digital, it was for scanning old films, because you didn’t need as much processing power,” says Brent. “You just take digital still cameras, turn them into these tabletop scanners, and then they run old nitrate films through that. Then they’re all just individual image files that can be digitally sequenced to recreate the motion, and you can put them together in any existing editing software and you You digitize film. That was really when Hollywood started going digital—then the actual computer part of these cameras became so good, you could bring in the scanner to set it, and suddenly, everything was digital.”

With more digital imaging and processing power, “you can get away with film altogether. Film was and still is very expensive, in fact, cost 17 cents a foot to develop,” Brant continues.

Talks have turned to shooting digital or film, and while some well-known filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan will continue shooting on negatives, Brent says it shows a gap in who has the resources that still use film to make their films. “I think everyone from this point forward is one-sidedly on the same page that digital excels, and it’s only going to get better.”

But Brant soon realized that with the digitization happening, there was a huge gap forming for it Save the movie. In Rochester is the Eastman House where Kodak founder George Eastman created “bomb shelter-type safes” to house lots of original negatives, like that The Wizard of Oz, as well as positive prints. “It’s exactly what you think it is: ultra-thin aisles with storage canisters, and they’re temperature controlled and monitored,” he says.

“The rest of the film, especially the stage prints, are worn out, riddled with scratches and splinters and just sitting in cardboard boxes, some as fragile as eggshells,” Brent says. “Why? It makes no sense to me, other than that [for] Contemporary Hollywood business model, it doesn’t make sense for them to invest money in these things, so what Michelle and I are trying to do is turn these films into monuments.”

The duo finds a lot of their films on estate sales, some of which are donation-based and stemming from lots of phone calls and emails with people who might know where the prints are located around the world. “Sometimes we get a call like, ‘Hey, we’re in Wichita, Kansas, we have a print that looks like crap, do you want it?'” And we go, ‘Sure.’ And we take it because we’re not interested in playing the movie or copying the movie. We’re interested in preserving the architecture of the delivery system that has been the industry’s workhorse: the movie.”

Once they have the film, they have to go through it and clean it to make sure it’s in good shape to keep. Most of the time it’s just a lot of dust, Brent says. “The big thing we also have, is that sometimes prints come to us badly penetrated, which means the ink on the actual film is actually oxidizing and getting very dull in color. We’ll still get them into the castings, but we break things.” [into smaller frames]. We are also in good conscience making sure that our content is properly digitized and is actually available to the public.”

They could use plexiglass, Brent says, however, and the resin coats the film, not only to give it a sleeker look, but also to prevent oxygen from getting into the print. In this way, the color can not fade, which can keep the printing forever. The casting process starts with the base, then they set the film and then there is an assembly line to deliver the resin. It takes about 10 days in their home workshop to make one item, but they don’t make one item at a time. “We treat it like a push,” Brent says.

their publications from star Wars Stills, as well as works by Tarantino, Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick are selling fast, the duo says, as musical films fly off the shelves. Theirs sells for between $60 and $120, depending on the size: a 6″ by 6″ area holds up to 1 second of film (24 frames), while a larger 17″ by 6″ rectangle holds 2 seconds of film (48 frames). . Custom orders can be made, while rare films are available for pricing by appointment. Ultimately, their goal is to make huge resin prints for museums and estates.

“The empathy that comes from these things is so powerful,” says Brent. “When people come to see what we’ve done with it, people just sit there for a second. We’ve been selling our film resins for a little less than a year. Usually the note we get is, ‘This is awesome, I’ve never seen anything like this’.”

At the end of the day, their mission is to give people back the love of film and create a community that understands what they were looking at when they first fell in love with these films, by bridging the past into the present using the film itself as a reminder.

JM Film Resins sells to local markets such as Los Feliz Flea, Melrose Trading Post, Artists & Fleas in Venice, Topanga Vintage Market, Malibu Farmers Market, and more. You can also find it at Instagram.