At the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, I have had the amazing opportunity to be connected to a variety of projects where my technical and multimedia experience can introduce SoMAS content to a wider audience. One of my main goals at SoMAS is to digitize our historical content and archive it online, through our website, social media channels and on YouTube.
While digging through our archives, I discovered “The Great Garbage Chase.” Dr. Larry Swanson revealed its lengthy history, and that information is now the video description we have on the SoMAS YouTube channel:
“In 1976, beach wash ups of marine debris and garbage occurred along the south shore of Long Island from Rockaway Beach to Shinnecock Inlet. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Marine Ecosystems Analysis Project commissioned the New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium to create the slideshow aimed at an audience of elementary students from kindergarten to 5th grade that highlighted the problem of marine debris and the mechanisms for how the NY Bight area suffered from these beach wash ups. That slideshow was recorded on video and served as the first version of “The Great Garbage Chase.”
Following the 1987/88 wash ups in New Jersey and New York, NY Sea Grant, EPA Clean Streets/Clean Beaches Program, Jersey City Clean Communities, and Marine Sciences Research Center’s (MSRC) Waste Management Institute (WMI) funded a remake of the slide show as a video with new art work. This was done in conjunction with a poster designed for subway cars that is known as “We’re Waiting for a Ride.” The artwork was created by Dana Lamont. The voices in the video are Stony Brook University/MSRC graduates Anne West-Valle and Max Stribe. At the time, Max was still a student and Anne worked for WMI. It was intended to have a Spanish audio track, as well, but Anne moved before that could be completed. The little boy featured in the film is the son of faculty Mary Scranton and Roger Flood.
Recently, Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences student Emily Markowitz worked with the SBU Library Preservation Department to have the video digitized. Emily, the Marine Sciences Club president, was working with the club on an outreach initiative to teach elementary and middle school students about plastic pollution in the ocean.
While the original production is nearly four decades old, the problem of marine debris still exists and has in fact gotten worse as society has become more and more dependent on plastics. This film is a still relevant today.”
The digitized version was created from a VHS copy of the film transferred to a DVD. The DVD was converted to .MP4 and uploaded to YouTube. The quality of the original transfer left a lot to be desired, and in conversations with Larry Swanson, he indicated that the original set of slides was available–he just had to find them. Not long after that, the slides were discovered and the restoration process could begin in earnest.
The restoration process for The Great Garbage Chase is somewhat similar to the process used to restore the animated Transformers: The Movie for its 30th Anniversary re-release on 4K Bluray. For Transformers: The Movie, the restoration involved digitally scanning each individual frame of 35mm film at high resolution and compiling the enhanced frames for the new film. In the Great Garbage Chase, the source material was a collection of seventy-seven 35mm slides that were scanned using a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 at a resolution of 2694 x 1760 pixels. The images were cropped (where appropriate) and resized to 1920 x 1080 pixels for the final frames.
The original digitized version of the film was 720 x 288 pixels. The audio track from the digital copy of the film was extracted and cleaned using Audacity’s Noise Reduction tool.
The film was created using Windows Movie Maker. The clean audio was arranged with the individual frames, updated credits were added at the end of the film, and everything was exported as an MP4 file for distribution. The Great Garbage Chase Remastered was released on the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences YouTube and Facebook pages.
Once the video was uploaded to YouTube, YouTube’s automatic closed captioning system started the process of creating subtitles to make the video accessible. The caption editor does a good job at recognizing voices and converting to text. For this film, the success rate was in the 80%-90% range, which meant that the corrective work was minimal. When complete, the closed captions can be enabled by pressing the CC button on YouTube. The subtitles can be exported from YouTube, as well. The default file format for YouTube is .SBV, however a .SRT file can be downloaded and used with many different media players.
The subtitles have a secondary benefit, as well. As described in the film’s summary, the original intention was to have a secondary audio track completed in Spanish. Recording additional language tracks requires a script, and the script for the film is buried in a box somewhere in one of the many storage closets at SoMAS. Using the subtitles, the script was recreated, opening up opportunities for translations.
Enjoy!
The Great Garbage Chase
Written by Ruth Folit
Edited and Produced by Marci L. Bortman and R.L. Swanson
Illustrations by Dana Lamont
Photography by Stacey Trimble and R.L. Swanson
Voices by Anne West-Valle and Max Strieb
Audio Engineering by Dave Erlich / WUSB Stony Brook
Audio Post Production by Brian Unger
1st Edition Sponsored by: NOAA / OMPA / NEO New York Sea Grant New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium
2nd Edition Sponsored by: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Waste Management Institute Marine Sciences Research Center at Stony Brook University
3rd Edition Sponsored by: Waste Reduction and Management Institute at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University
