Inside the Archive #59: Screencraft, floppy disc fever and resilient TV capture

For ninety years, the BFI has cared for the nation’s screen heritage, from the moving images we see on screen, to the creative materials that make film and television possible. Filmmakers’ working archives, scripts, designs, storyboards, costume drawings, production designs, animation artwork and stills photography are the traces of craft, imagination and labour that sit behind every screen production.

For decades, this part of the BFI National Archive has been known as Special Collections, but today, we are excited to share a new name – Screencraft – one that better reflects the collections and our growing body of work.

What makes this collection unique is that it documents the craft of filmmaking. Scripts, schedules, budgets, artists’ books, sketches, casting notes, dope sheets, posters, stills and emerging digital practices are just some of the materials that capture the acts of making that come before anything reaches our screens. They show us how ideas form, how productions are financed, how casts and crews are brought together, how sets are built, how performances are shaped, how time is kept, what ends up on the cutting room floor and how a huge community of creative professionals collaborate to make it all possible.

The name Screencraft foregrounds the lived, skilled, and material processes behind screen production. Most of the objects in Screencraft are works on paper, working documents that have been handled, annotated, cut, exchanged and revised. Paper holds stories not only of finished films but of the process of making. Across all departments and all levels of the industry, these documents speak to the people and the craft of filmmaking.

Looking through the lens of craft helps us widen the frame: to notice the makers behind the production, to recognise labour historically overlooked, to ask whose voices are heard, and whose have gone unnoticed. The new name signals our commitment to surfacing a broader and deeper history of screen work.

As well as being records of screen work, sketches, drawings, photographs, notebooks – both analogue and digital – are creative works in their own right. They bear the mark of the hand, the eye and the machine. They carry aesthetic intent, reflections, experimentation and care. The term Screencraft allows us to acknowledge both craft within the screen industries, and the crafted nature of the objects themselves. It recognises that as well as surviving as records of work, these objects operate as art, design, communication and material culture.

In our work, we want to acknowledge that the act of caring for these materials – preserving, conserving, describing, interpreting – is itself a form of making. It requires judgement, creativity and continual adaptation as formats change, technologies evolve and collections shift. Craft is not only what we collect, it’s how we work. The new name reflects the ethos that guides our practice: attentive, materialled, human-centred care. Screencraft continues to be a resource for researchers, filmmakers, artists and designers, students, curators, and anyone curious about how films and television are made.

Learn more about how you can view and access Screencraft material.

– Screencraft team

I said, a flip, flop, the floppy, the disky, to the flip flip flop, flop – you get the idea…

One of the constant challenges of digital preservation is keeping up with the rapid pace of advancement in technology, both physical and digital. What is the latest and best technology today may soon seem dated when the next best thing comes along, never mind in 20 years’ time when it’s just a distant memory. Constant hardware change is a headache for digital preservation, because getting hold of hardware to access obsolete formats becomes more difficult as time passes. This is an especially worrying problem when once ubiquitous formats become harder to access.

Floppy discs are just one example of this issue – a once widespread format, now a distant memory to those of us who used them daily. For some, the contents of any remaining discs are also a distant memory, but there are people working to ensure that floppy discs can be accessed in the future, so that the knowledge held on them is not lost forever.

One such person is Leontien Talboom, a Technical Analyst for Cambridge University, who is attempting to keep knowledge on how to access floppy discs alive as part of the Future Nostalgia Project. One of the project outputs was a workshop, the Festival of Floppies, led by Leontien to share this knowledge with the archival community. I attended the event at Cambridge University Library. Given the high likelihood that many film makers’ collections will contain floppy discs, this knowledge will be of benefit to my work in the Our Screen Heritage (OSH) project and beyond, identifying what actions and tools will be needed for future preservation work.

So, at the end of this workshop, what knowledge and skills did I come away with? How to insert a floppy disc into a reader is still fresh in my head (despite the intervening years), but I now also have the knowledge required to connect that reader to a more modern computer and operating system. This is achieved by using Greaseweasel, a handy little software-hardware combo that allows floppy disc readers and modern computers to talk to each other. Once this is all connected, it’s possible to scan a floppy disc to see if there’s any data on it and what state it’s in. Assuming there’s something on the disc and that it hasn’t become corrupted over time, it should then be possible to copy data off the disc for preservation. From there, there’s a whole new set of challenges to gain access to the data, but that is for another workshop and another time.

I now feel better prepared to assess floppy discs for what tools and actions might be needed to preserve them in future work. Admittedly, that covers a relatively small proportion of the OSH collections, but the skills I’ve learnt will be of use beyond this project, given how widely floppy discs were used at one point in time.

Overall, it was an interesting day of learning and a worthwhile addition to my digital preservation toolbox. It was also nice to take a stroll down memory lane, albeit one that was followed by a terrifying 200mph blast back up the motorway of “where did the last 20 years go”.

– Tom Wilson, Digital Preservation Archivist

Find out more about the Future Nostalgia project in a BBC Future feature article about Cambridge University Library’s work.

About six months ago, I introduced myself and explained the need to keep our digital collection safe. If you missed it, you can read our earlier piece, Inside the Archive #40: Data defence.

I realised I left out something important. Cyber security is often seen as a blocker to progress. I try really hard to be a business enabler because good cyber security should enable us to improve how we do things. Here’s one example of that in action.

We archive UK live TV using a system we developed called STORA (System for Television Off-air Recording and Archiving). Essentially, it records 27 channels of live satellite TV and automatically ingests them into our digital archive. Our developers have previously written about the open source projects that make this possible, and we’ve shared the history of the technology we use to archive TV.

To make the system resilient, we run a primary and a backup STORA server. Both servers record at the same time, and if a recording fails on one, we can use the other. The problem? Both servers were in the same data centre rack. If the power, air conditioning, or satellite signal failed, we could lose both. For a system that records live broadcasts, that matters because once a programme airs there’s no second chance. Thunderstorms or other local issues could mean lost recordings.

This is where cyber security steps in. Over the past year, we’ve invested heavily in creating a secure infrastructure. As someone who works mainly remotely, I’ve been keen to build a secure way to connect to our network – partly selfishly, so I can spend more time working remotely! This system is now rolled out to many of our “privileged users”, giving controlled access to parts of the network that were previously off-limits from home.

With the success of this remote access, we realised we could take it further and run our backup STORA server on a geographically separate part of the archive network, at the BFI Master Film Store in Gaydon, Warwickshire. To make this work, we collaborated with our industry networking partners, in-house developers, facilities team, satellite experts, and computer engineers as well as the team at Gaydon to build a system that maintains – and even enhances – resilience, security, and functionality. Just yesterday, the satellite engineer was thrilled to discover that if both sites lose the satellite feed, it isn’t his equipment at fault, but the broadcaster’s – something we couldn’t verify before.

Good cyber security isn’t about stopping work or putting barriers in the way. It’s about making sure systems operate safely and reliably. Clear controls around network access, permissions, and data flows allowed us to place STORA in a separate location without increasing risk. Cyber security enabled us to design a resilient system, rather than limiting where or how it could run.

Moving STORA to Gaydon is another step in strengthening how we capture and preserve the UK’s television output. Digital preservation isn’t just about storage or software – it’s about planning for the unexpected and making sure that today’s broadcasts remain part of our shared cultural memory.

Just as with film stored in climate-controlled vaults, the work behind the scenes helps ensure that what we collect today will still be there for future generations to discover.

– Will Pook, Cyber Security Engineer

Our Screen Heritage and the Inside the Archive blog are supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.