FLHS Students to Create Digital News Archive

A class of Fort Lee High School students in Tony Galatioto’s Video Production class visited the Fort Lee Museum Thursday morning, getting their first look at some of the old news footage some of them will work with the Fort Lee Film Commission to digitize and archive.

The film commission received the entire archive of Channel 10 News broadcasts this year from Time Warner Cable, according to film commission executive director Tom Meyers. Channel 10 News broadcast on the former Vision Cable and then on Time Warner Cable for about 25 years—mostly in the 1980s and 90s. The hour-long news broadcasts, the tapes of which are currently being kept in a room on the second floor of the museum, covered towns in southeast Bergen County, including Fort Lee and 13 other towns along the waterfront from Englewood and Englewood Cliffs all the way down to Weehawken.

“The hundreds of tapes shelved in the museum archive include video of events and people of great importance to Fort Lee and tell the story of our community over a roughly 25-year period,” Meyers said recently.

On Thursday, he explained the project to the students, telling them how they were going to take the hours upon hours of analog footage, convert it to a digital format and catalog and archive the broadcasts.

“We can have them streaming on websites,” Meyers said. “We can make them available on your website at the high school, on our historical society and film commission websites and make them available for the average resident in town—but also for people who are studying the history of this location and maybe writing books, maybe writing histories about this area. We hope to make this digital archive available to local researchers, historians and the general public. This project can be as much fun as you want it to be.”

The ninth through 12th graders in Galatioto’s class, along with some members of the school’s extracurricular video production club, will work with Fort Lee Film Commission member Marc Perez, a Fort Lee High School graduate who now owns New York City-based Sirk Productions, a digital media company that produces both commercial and theatrical films. Sirk’s most recent film, Severe Clear (2009), is about a U.S. Marine from New Jersey and his experiences in the Iraq war. The one before that, Anytown, USA (2005), was about a mayoral election in Bogota, NJ.

“Where I found most of my projects is from local history and local people,” Perez, who started his company with his cousin and friend, who both grew up in Leonia, told the students. “I use a lot of local stories—kind of what I know—to make my stories. So I think going through all this stuff, you can get great ideas and great source material for anything you guys might be thinking of doing. I always say, ‘Write what you know.’ I know New Jersey.”

He went on to explain the importance of converting the now obsolete, three-quarter inch U-Matic tapes into a digital format.

“Tapes don’t last forever,” Perez said. “It’s pretty important that we get it on a digital format, because tapes deteriorate. The digital format will last forever.”

Galatioto said his students will benefit not only from learning the technical side of converting analog footage to digital, but from learning how to log and catalog, thus creating an archive and potentially useful resource.

“If you want to show a Fourth of July celebration, you can look and find out when it was,” Galatioto said by way of example. “That’s the real legwork in doing this thing. Because of Fort Lee and its history, this will be valuable for the students.”

During the summer, the students will be given the opportunity to work on the project at Perez’s studio in New York, and then when school resumes in the fall, they’ll be able to continue work on the long-term project at the museum.

Junior Jonathan Acosta said he thinks working on the project will prove valuable for his immediate future.

“Especially now, with college applications, a major part of this project is assisting in getting into college,” he said. “Also, this is a great experience, because I’m going into this as a major.”

Senior Kelly Lahungay said she’s interested in the project for other reasons.

“I’m not really sure about the future as far as majoring in it or a career,” she said. “But I really enjoy it as a hobby, and I really like editing film.”

Perez pointed out to Lahungay and the other college- and career-minded members of the class that “the film business is a business,” and that the experience they gain from the project can extend to disciplines beyond that of actually making a film.

“There’s everything from the business end to marketing to advertising to the writing to shooting it,” Perez said. “It’s not just artistically trying to make a film. It’s everything around that. It’s helping that movie—you want people to see it. I went to business school. I didn’t even go to film school. I never thought of it as a career until I graduated.”

He told the students his cousin went to film school and asked him to help.

“I realized I don’t necessarily have to be physically making movies, but I could help get his movies out,” he said. “And then I ended up getting so involved that I make the movies too now.”

In a related project, some of Galatioto’s students may soon get a chance to tape future Fort Lee Board of Education meetings.

The Fort Lee Film Commission recently donated funds for the high school to purchase two digital camcorders and associated equipment specifically to allow video students to use the equipment outside the school and gain real experience by doing things like taping meetings. Although the cameras haven’t yet been purchased, Meyers said it looks like the school board is willing to work with the film commission to make the taping of meetings happen—most likely starting in the fall.

“Every time the Board of Education meets, we’ll take some of you, and you’ll handle the cameras with Marc’s help,” Meyer’s explained to the kids. “They really don’t want it edited, but we’ll have two cameras, so the idea is you can cut, you can do close-ups and you will work with Marc in post-production on that. These will be broadcast on Time Warner Cable and perhaps the Internet. Everything you do here is good for yourself, it’s good for the school and it’s good for the community.”