Under the supervision of Simona Monizza the curator and collection specialist for experimental film at the EYE FILM ARCHIVE in Amsterdam, Simon Pummell's studio archive -- comprising of a wide range of film and video material, paper and props and puppets -- have been taken into the EYE's permanent collection.

Many of Pummell’s films combine archaic animation techniques with contemporary high-end VFX techniques. And the earliest films were made in the first decades (90s and 2000s) of the shift from analogue to digital cinema technologies: a period where digital VFX processes and digital delivery formats for both TV and cinema changed very rapidly. So the permanent archiving of the work soon became a restoration initiative : involving the re-tracing of hybrid production and VFX practices that combined many layers of analogue and digital imaging, and then solving the archival challenge of the migration of titles from their original - but now obsolete - mastering formats.

For example: many of the early animation films were created at the MILL post-production house in London via numerous iterations of digital sub-masters and finally mastered to D1 format. With each tape as big as a briefcase, Sony D1 had a very brief life as a high end broadcast mastering tape format in the late 90s : the restoration team were only able to locate a single machine still functioning in The Netherlands and migrate the master material to a hardware agnostic format.

The work with the EYE archive is therefore not only a restoration project of particular works but a research project into contemporary archiving concerns and strategies for television and cinema made across unconventional mixes of technique and technology. The post-production house Raamw3rk has been bringing the expertise of Barend Onneweer to the restoration and re-mastering. Johan Glas oversaw the transfers from digital tape to file.

The short films of the years 1990 - 2000 are now fully restored and available in 2K DCP masters.

Work on scanning and remastering the feature film BODYSONG (2003) as a 4K restoration is currently in progress.

Works and objects in the EYE collection are catalogued here: