Vancouver: The 15-year-old negative cutting business built by Gay Black and her late husband Wayne in Vancouver was recently purchased by interests from Seattle.

On July 31, Original Conforming Services was bought by Andy Pratt, proprietor of Seattle-based Negative Cutting and Conforming, and business partner John Irick, a Seattle businessman and filmmaker. Terms of the purchase – including equipment and a client list – have not been released.

Irick says he and Pratt were courted by local film labs, which were worried that Vancouver might lose business if only one neg cutting company was operating. (North Vancouver-based Bert Bush is the only other negative cutter in the Vancouver area.)

‘They [the film labs] wanted to ensure that the Vancouver film industry would stay local and that people wouldn’t leave town to finish their films,’ says Irick.

The acquisition was well timed, with independent and service production in Vancouver in high gear.

Irick says Vancouver’s production industry is about 10 times the size of Seattle’s, and with the sagging looney, OCS is beginning to attract the attention of Los Angeles companies looking to skip Seattle to bring work to Vancouver.

OCS specializes in 16mm and 35mm film negative cutting, the age-old process of manually splicing actual film. The process endures in spite of the expanding technologies used in movie making.

‘Negative cutting is the last frontier of the old school of filmmaking,’ says Irick, who adds that OCS often has to educate filmmakers about the process itself.

Irick says the Seattle operation does a lot of its work after editors have finished the locked print of a film. By working in Vancouver, with its many Vancouver-made and edited productions, he says OCS is in a position to consult earlier in the editing process and, in some cases, create some cost savings for producers.

According to Irick, it can take two-and-a-half weeks to turn around the negative cutting portion of a film.

Recent projects include Sharon McGowan’s local indie feature Better than Chocolate (aka Maggie and Lila), archival work for Crescent Entertainment’ new series The Crow, New City Productions’ latest in-house feature Exhuming Mr. Rice, animated short Pictorial Forest (by Heath Tait) and Cadence Entertainment’s Tail Lights Fade.

As the ‘chief surgeon,’ Pratt has 33 years’ experience. His credits include each of the original Star Wars movies, Lawrence of Arabia and Annie Hall.

In his career, the California native has worked for Deluxe and 20th Century Fox.

Local film cutters Ingrid Rosen and Liz Tevaarwerk are also on the OCS front line. Rosen has worked on The Grey Fox and the documentary Island of Whales among other titles. Tevaarwerk specializes in 16mm cutting and caters to independent filmmakers and students.