Ned Price Quotes
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Cover | Poor | Condition | Scenes | Censored |
That let us cover for the poor condition of the scenes censored out of the U.S. version. Using this approach, we were able to manufacture complete shots. We would find a cut with a missing five frames, or whatever, and we'd then have to fill in the difference from other sources. A key scene in which the men on Skull Island fall off a log, for instance, always missed the end of the sequence, showing the impact of their fall at the end strange things like that. But we were able to put them back together. In fact, our final restoration has an additional three minutes of material than [the originally restored version].
- Ned Price
They had to go through every piece, shot by shot, cleaning and repairing them. The picture elements were then sent to [Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging], where [colorist] Ray Grabowski completed a second electronic evaluation of all that material, causing us to make some adjustments to the road map. At the end of the evaluation, we had an EDL prepared for our 4K scan. A similar process was used for the soundtrack, which was transferred and restored [by Jim Young at Chase Productions, Burbank] from elements we took from unilateral, variable area tracks on the original British dupe negative, a 35mm composite nitrate print, and a 16mm print. After the 4K scan, it all went back to Ray, and he performed a comprehensive color grade.
- Ned Price
We were aware of the nitrate element held by [New York's Museum of Modern Art]  a 1942 print of the movie that everyone thought was a fine grain, which Turner Entertainment used as the backbone of their 1993 restoration. But it wasn't actually a fine grain, as it turned out, but rather a 1942 print on [Kodak] 1302 release stock. That stock was a bit finer than typical release print stock [1301] or lavender [1355] print stock from that era, so we were able to use some of it. But this element also has missing frames and dupe sections. It has those cement splices, notches, tape repairs, and severe flash frames at various cuts. Scenes originally censored and deleted from the film were part of that restoration, but you could see, judging from the print, how poor the condition of the original camera negative was, even by 1942. So finding material was probably the hardest part of this job.
- Ned Price