When David Paperny began preproduction on his documentary Murder in Normandy, he was put in touch with the curator of the Normandy Museum in Bayeux, France.

What the Vancouver-based filmmaker discovered was a documentarian’s dream, most significantly because it provided him a wealth of material specific to his story, but also because it was free.

Excited that the story of 145 Canadian soldiers captured and killed by Hitler Youth in the weeks after the D-Day invasion was finally being told, the curator gave Paperny complete access to the museum archives, a boon that proved indispensable to the filmmaker.

‘He brought out of a closet in his museum five canisters of original newsreel footage of the battle of Normandy,’ Paperny says. ‘I got it for free for my show.’ Beyond that, Paperny accessed six albums of precious archival stills, too numerous to display at the museum, that Paperny photographed on the spot, and later transferred to tape and edited into the show.

‘He also was so excited about the project that he brought out an original SS Lugar, a German pistol, that we used in our reenactment, and one of the original ss caps worn by generals during the war.’ The cap was worn by actor Robert Wisden (Da Vinci’s Inquest), who played Hitler Youth commander Kurt Meyer during dramatic reenactment sequences.

While he usually spends about 10% of his budget on archival material, Paperny needed to only divert $35,000 of Murder in Normandy’s $500,000 budget toward such resources, thanks, in part, to the goodwill of the curator.

The filmmaker’s good fortune in accessing such indispensable historical materials illustrates the kind of serendipity often required to see a documentary through to fruition. With the costs of archival footage at an all-time high, filmmakers like Paperny are searching out historical sources any way possible.

But good fortune and cooperative curators are only part of the tale. More and more, filmmakers are coming up with creative ways to tell a story and access provocative source material. Techniques such as dramatic reenactments, or shooting scenes in a style reflecting a certain era; borrowing home videos or employing photographs, paintings and headlines are only a few examples of what these filmmakers will do to create compelling visuals.

For his part, Paperny carries his own portable copy stand and still camera around the world, which allows him to take high-quality slides of photos and clippings from just about anywhere, including people’s homes and museums.

Part of the reason costs are increasing on archival materials is that demand is skyrocketing. Through a proliferation of specialty channels around the world, networks and major museums are creating profitable businesses selling the rights to their material for broadcast. And while traditional outlets such as the National Film Board, cbc and major u.s. networks have been in the business for years, smaller film companies, libraries and museums have begun to recognize the great business potential in their archives.

‘I think a lot of the places are getting really…ruthless and greedy as to how much they can actually charge,’ says Carrie Nadu, line producer for The Canadians, a Great North Productions’ series which runs on History Television.

In one example, Great North had to pay the International Olympic Committee us$5,000 ($7,350) for one minute of footage. On the other hand, Nadu has also run into people who have no idea of the value of the footage they own and charge a few hundred dollars for unlimited use, she says.

The Canadians’ budget is $200,000 per episode, of which up to $30,000 will go to stock footage. Nadu says the show’s two biggest sources for archival material are cbc and the nfb, but they also tracked down footage of old u.s. talk shows which the networks have since burned but which was found on vhs in a private video collection. ‘We can still access it by pulling it off a home vhs, but that’s what we’re limited to if we can’t find it,’ says Nadu.

Of course, she says, they still have to pay the network for any footage used.

Other good sources for material are labs and corporations which house their own archives, says Alan Mendelsohn, series producer of Turning Points of History, a Barna-Alper production now in its third year. Private foundations, city archives and universities are also excellent sources for stills, he adds.

‘The biggest challenge is the cost of archive,’ Mendelsohn says. ‘Archive is very exorbitant. It’s gone up astronomically.’

Barna-Alper, Mendelsohn says, will spend on average between $10,000 and $30,000, or one-third of the budget, for one installment of the series. ‘Archive costs determine the story,’ he says.

Part of the cost problem comes when a producer who has gained Canadian rights to a piece of footage tries to sell a production internationally. Mendelsohn says the cost then increases by three to four times.

Then, if a documentary maker wants to use a so-called ‘signature piece’ – one of those pieces of footage that come to define a time or a place – the costs go so high it can break a budget. One such signature piece, the nbc-owned footage of the South Vietnamese general shooting a young Vietcong man in the head, costs several thousand dollars for 13 seconds, he says.

The potential to profit is so great, in fact, that many production companies have turned to selling footage from their old productions.

‘There’s all kinds of these,’ says Bill O’Farrell of Ottawa-based General Assembly Films. O’Farrell was a vice-president and worked for more than 40 years at Ottawa’s Crawley Films, which made a business out of selling its old footage until 1991 when it donated its films to the National Archives. ‘We have supplied stock footage to, God, I don’t know how many.’

Technology is also changing the archival business. Some companies have begun transferring material onto dvd while others offer stills on cd-rom or for downloading off the Internet. These advancements not only increase searchability and availability, but could eventually bring down costs. It will also help preserve precious footage.

O’Farrell says the digital era will have another effect on how filmmakers use historical sources. That will come when documentarians begin recreating historic scenes with animation software. ‘If, for instance, you saw people walking down the street and carrying signs, you can’t really depend that they are actually the [same] signs that they were carrying or that somebody has gone in and changed the whole placard,’ he says. ‘It’s extremely simple to do with the new technology.’

While this approach is far from common, many filmmakers do consider it cheaper to hire a crew and shoot their own footage than to go to an archive and request, say, city shots.

‘Let’s say you’re doing Washington,’ says Mendelsohn. ‘You’re doing the White House; you’re doing the State Department; you’re doing all sorts of buildings that are important to your story. It’s much cheaper, much better to do your own original shooting if those buildings are the same as when your story broke,’ he says. ‘You try to shoot it in a way that looks of that era.’

But will filmmakers abandon the archives forever if prices continue toward the stratosphere? When he was making Murder in Normandy, Paperny inquired about using footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous 1935 documentary on Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. It was going to cost $300 per second, Paperny says. ‘Needless to say, we didn’t [use it].’

But Paperny remains optimistic. He says viewers will always appreciate the real thing when they see it. ‘Good archival footage is fantastic,’ he says. ‘It’s a treasure, if used properly.’

And regardless of costs, filmmakers will always find some way to put history on screen.