Dear AT,
Does anyone know where to find movie stills from older foreign films in poster sizes or larger? Or how to get stills and blow them up? Fellini and Antonioni in particular?
Thanks!
Nina
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Link To All Good Questions
Here's a great site that I found a while back, for High-res movie scans:
http://www.doctormacro.com
Not sure what they have in terms of foreign movie stills, but it's worth a look!
Wasn't there a posting about blowing up photos last week? I can't remember when, exactly, but try poking around the archives. It was pulled from "Blueprint."
What are the copyright implications of something like this? I mean, it's one thing if you're blowing up your own photo or something that's "public domain" (like a playing card), but what if it's something like a movie still? It seems it would be clearer if it were something like a postcard (taken by a photographer, licensed by a publishing company, copyright owned by the artist), but how do you treat movie stills? The same way you treat photojournalism? Does anyone know?
it depends what you're really looking for.
most stills from older films were produced in the form of what are called lobby cards, at a size of 8x10 or 11x14. they were mass produced as promotional shwag to be displayed in movie theater lobbies. it should be pretty easy to buy these on eBay for a film you like, scan them at high resolution, and print them at whatever size you like (via kinkos' large format printers or rasterbate.com).
something else you can do, if you don't find what you're looking for in eBay lobby cards, would be to get a DVD of the film in question (preferably a high quality remastered print a la Criterion Collection) and do a screen capture from within your computer. you can then save it as a .jpg and print them at your preferred size. this might be slightly less hi-res than the lobby card scan, though, so be careful. and make sure your screen is as finely calibrated as possible.
oh, and about copyrights.
if you're doing this for your own personal home use, you're probably fine. especially if you actually own the original (in paper or DVD form). it's very unlikely that the feds are going to come into your home, see that you have a copyrighted image on the wall, and haul you off to prison for piracy. unless it seems like it's a for-proft operation, the folks at kinkos probably won't have a problem helping you out.
if it's an obscure foreign title, there's even less chance of getting in trouble.
just in case you're curious, though (or planning on using this in an ad for your business, as part of a film set, merchandise sold for proftit, etc.), here's how film still usage rights break down. firstly, there's the photo credit. in a lobby card, that would be the film's still photographer. i'm not sure about a screen capture, but i'm pretty sure you would be considered the photographer (as opposed to the film's director or cinematographer). then you have usage rights on the movie itself, which concerns the company that owns the rights to the film as a whole. in addition to all that, you also have to deal with image rights -- the actors whose faces appear in the photograph. or their estates.
so yeah, the rights issues here are pretty fraught. but as long as we're just talking about private home use, you're fine.
the opoponax:
How are you able to ahchieve screen shots? My Mac does not allow me to do a screen capture while a DVD is playing, either paused or otherwise. It informs me that that feature is unavailable during DVD playback.
I tried on my Windows laptop and the screenshot has a black image where the DVD paused screen was. This surely must be designed to combat piracy?
weird. i never thought it wouldn't be possible to do that.
how do people make screen shots of films, then? i mean, it's something people do all the time, right?
maybe i'm not as graphic savvy as i thought...
If you can't capture a screenshot from a DVD, you may be missing a necessary piece of software.
We took screenshots from The Conversation to carry around when we were trying to match the locations to what they look like now. (This falls under Fair Use.) I think the husband was using software that ran in Linux, just because he usually does, but it wasn't anything exotic related to piracy, just some fairly ordinary tool.
The quality of the screenshots wasn't good enough to blow up to larger poster size, though. I have no idea how fixable that is.
You can't capture Video screenshots using the Windows default "Print Screen" button. You'll need a third party application that captures it. I believe Snag-it captures video and I know is a great piece of software.
Try
www.larryedmunds.com
which is FAMOUS (if you have ever worked in film) for its lobby cards, stills, posters and books pertaining to movies.
They apparently auction on ebay too.