The Twleve (restored 2006 documentary) 2025 directed by Vincent-louis Apruzzese

 Originally released in 2006 on Amazon and then updated several times later, this documentary is about Boston’s most diverse dance club, open from the 70s to the 90s. Three floors, a piano bar and pool tables in the basement, a new wave punk dance floor and then a classic disco dance floor… plus in good weather a roof deck with a grill! The entire LBGT+ community was welcome and mixed together as well straight people and a few other minorities that were not welcomed in other, straighter bars at the time. 

This version is recut, new graphics, where possible, with better sound and upscaled to HD. It was filmed on zero budget with an old video camera and a mono microphone from the Radio Shack so I’ve tried to improve it where possible but tech is only so magical, even these days.

The goal is to give people who were not able to go to this wonderful place and a sense of what it was like and to remind the world of Boston’s gay history and a world that is now gone and lost.

Memorial project: Tomorrow is Another Day

 

My friend Ralph had a long, maybe 10 year project, he worked on. It was a sequel to his favourite film, Gone with the Wind and he wanted to tell that story basically as a graphic novel or comic book and include as many old Hollywood stars from the film's era into his new story. They had to be around and available to David O Selznick when a second movie would have been made. He used the technique he used in making his renowned paper doll books, drawing out each page on letter sized paper, inking it and then making a copy of the cleaned up artwork to paint with watercolours. This had the extra step of typing out the dialogue for the thought balloons and then attaching them to the finished art before making colour photocopies to produce the final version of each page. 

Sadly my friend did not understand you can't sell a new story based on someone else's copyrighted work so this giant effort could never been professionally published and it was a huge disappointment for him. He showed its and pieces of the work to people but almost never the entire thing despite people, like me, begging him to. I wanted to scan the original art and put into a self published book using the company Blurb so he could see what it might have looked like as a "real"  book and even have copies made for his friends. That wasn't something I could get him to sign on to though. 

Now, after his passing his good friend Dan has spent a lot of time scanning a copies of the entire project he managed to get Ralph to give him so that i can fix it up and make that blurb book and a PDF version for his loved ones. 

This will take a LONG time. I did take the page I thought might be the most challenging and make it usable. I worked on the colour and straightening out the scan but the most difficult part was the text, especially the long list of movies stars listed. Some of the names were unreadable. So I removed all the text except the title by hand and recreated the art beneath it so as to have a clean image to put more readable text over. I hand typed the replacement text and researched names I could not read well to be reasonably sure they were the names Ralph wanted and then re-arranged the placement of them so the names could be a little larger and easier to read when printed. 

On top is the finished page so far and below is the original scan and the page after I removed the text. This isn't nearly the most interesting or exciting page in the book but I think it will be (I hope) the one needing the most work to prepare it for printing. I would have had a full age just for the names so they could be a decent size but this is as far from Ralph's original design I am willing to go. 

Documentary restoration: The Twelve - Boston gar bar logos

 I started my next documentary restoration. Each one gets more complicated and prepares me for the next. This was originally made in 2006 and, as usual, with no budget. The former 1270 security head, Bruce, found all sorts of photos and some very rough video about the club, its owner and the people who went there. I had a clip taken from a memorial video that showed many of the old gay bars in Boston which wasn't ideal but it was all I could find. 20 years later, there is a lot more info on the web but still not as much as I would like. I went through photos, newspaper and magazine ads and found a good 20 logos I could clean up or redraw and give a consistent look too to replace the bad video with something more professional. In 2011 I re-edited the 2006 version and took out some bad graphics of my own and this time I hope to do more of that and elevate the doc closer to today's standards. I discovered Final Cut Pro will isolate the voices  and it took out the background music which will give me more options for re-editing the film as the original interview files are long gone. 

Documentary: Tobias Allen - Why I Paint This way (2001 restoration)

 In 2001 I films a short documentary about (then) local Boston artist Tobias Blaine Allen.  It was edited in iMovie which was amazing at the time. I looked at it online recently and it looked TERRIBLE. 240p was fine on You Tube when it was uploaded and its unwatchable now. 

Today I found a better copy but still low resolution on my hard drive and upscaled it to HD. Then I brought it into Final Cut Pro and did some colour correction and audio fixes. Sadly, there are no copies of the images of the art in the film to replace those in the doc so I exported the worst of them as images and did my best to make them look nicer. They still don't look great, or ever did, they were shot with an early 1.5 megapixel Sony digital camera. 

The process took about 7 hours to complete the 1 minute film and now it's HD and looks and sounds much better. Hopefully Toby with think so! I will delete the older film so no one has to see how bad it looked on modern devices. 

Restoring BigMa

BigMa was what we called my mother's mother while she was alive. I made a documentary about her many years ago.

Recently my mother found and old photo of her she wanted me to restore and print for her. Oddly I had a copy of this photo already, but it was a scan of a photo copy I used in the title credits of the film so when I had the chance to work from a much higher resolution scan of it I was really happy to do it. 

For years I worked with PBS on a few American Experience episodes (won 2 Emmys and a Peabody Award on those projects yet somehow haven't had any more work from them in years) restoring and animating images and I LOVED doing it. This little thing for my mom made me realize how much I love to bring back old photos to their former glory. 

I could have taken this even further but there is a point where only I will ever see the work I did in the restoration. I have a very precise series of steps I do when restoring something. I start fixing the largest problems first which are usually tears and missing body parts. If I have access to other photos from the same period of the same person, I can usually replace a hand or arm or eye, there are limits of course. I will then clean up the dust and stains, by hand. If there are big black sections with dust and scratches I might selects only the black and run a dust an scratches filter to save time, but only in areas of solid black. 

Lastly I will convert it to black and white (if the photo was in B&W to begin with of course) and then add back in the sepia tone if the client wants it.