Your donations can help us to rescue rare films, audio tapes, and lost moments of Supermarionation history from vanishing forever.
WHO ARE WE?
We're Century 21 Films, a UK independent production company, with a particular interest in archive film and television. Over the last decade our productions have included the ITV drama series Endeavour, Thunderbirds: The Anniversary Episodes, and Cartoon Carnival - a history of silent animation and the efforts to preserve it.
Now, we are engaged on our own mission to rescue the past - but this time a different form of animation. Super Marionette Animation - or as it's better known "Supermarionation" – the production technique used to make the many 1960s Gerry & Sylvia Anderson television shows such as Stingray, Captain Scarlet & the Mysterons, and, of course, Thunderbirds.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
We've always been interested in preserving ephemera to do with these shows as part of our on-going work documenting the behind the scenes story for our many documentaries. However, over the last year this has accelerated at some considerable pace following the discovery by the family of Len Walter, the Supervising Editor on Thunderbirds, of 22 cans of 35mm film. After taking these films away, it turned out that these weren't ordinary prints of Thunderbirds, but specially struck prints used by the production team in the making of the series. Despite having been stored in a garden shed, we were able to recover excellent images from the prints, even though they were already suffering from Vinegar Syndrome - effectively the chemical breakdown of the film which eventually leaves just slush.
From this collection, we recovered three episodes of Thunderbirds as alternative edits, including a rejected version of the second episode to enter production, "Pit of Peril", which had footage from Thunderbirds unseen in 60 years - the first "new" footage to appear from the series since it finished in the 1960s. This has now been cleaned and scanned in 4K, preserving it for future generations.
The resulting news coverage has led to an avalanche of other material being offered to us to investigate and we have now helped recover more missing items, including unbroadcast footage from Supercar, missing music by Barry Gray written for Thunderbirds and other shows, plus, previously unseen photographs, paperwork, and even original voice artist dialogue tracks extracted from the guard bands of old 1/4" tape with a specially modified tape deck.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
To make this possible, we are indebted to the individuals who have made material available to us to investigate (it would have been far easier just to bin some of this stuff), to Hasan Matar and Mark Ayres for undertaking to do the film and audio recovery work, and to Paul Simpson and Bert van Ijken for making funds available to allow us to get the entire project underway. Even with the generous offers of technical assistance, there have been certain costs that we cannot mitigate.
We still have material to investigate and are on the hunt for more. But, the scale of the project has grown such that it has become really quite a costly venture. Therefore, we are asking fans for financial help. Now, we should state here that we will endeavour to continue regardless of meeting our goal, but financial assistance does allow us to investigate this stuff quicker - and sometimes speed is of the essence when it comes to rescuing audio and visual material. So your help would make a difference.
This is not like our 2015 Kickstarter to make new episodes of Thunderbirds in which we offered rewards - this time we are asking for simple donations with funds going to assist the recovery and preservation of further Supermarionation material (and, indeed, anything else of historical significance that we find).
Needless to say that we are not gathering this stuff for it to remain out of sight. Apart from regular updates on our YouTube channel, we are in active discussions with various companies about releasing this material officially as soon as possible, so that fans may be given the opportunity to see it all for themselves.
WHERE THE FUNDS GO
Funds raised by this GoFundme campaign will go towards, but are not limited to:
– The costs of digital transfer of film and audio tape material
– The digital storage of video and audio files
– The proper physical storage of archive materials
– The restoration of damaged material recovered
Any funds raised beyond out initial target will continue to go towards the project.
We appreciate that not everybody is in a position to contribute to a project like this at the moment and so deeply appreciate if you choose to do so.
Organizer
Stephen La Rivière
Organizer
England