In stock footage, everything old is new again as it becomes clear historical is where the action is.

Stock ‘is in boom, absolutely,’ says Sylvie Menard, stock shot co-ordinator at the National Film Board.

And the rise in historical documentary is to thank for that. ‘I would say there are a lot of people at this point looking for that type of footage because there’s a lot of historical series in production and being broadcast in Canada with historical channels. People are using more and more that type of footage. [The subject] could be anything: planes, trains, lifestyle, World War ii or World War i,’ says Menard.

While no genre is dominant, historical is strong – including both specific events and slices of life, like people in breadlines in the 1930s.

‘It’s real life and it’s real life over a hundred years, so that covers a lot of subjects,’ says Menard. ‘I would say a lot of [what is being sought] is events, but even small people make history.

‘People are using more and more footage because they’re making not just documentary but historical [docs]. They’re not just telling a story today but going back in time, talking about something that has an evolution through a hundred years, and they want footage of that.’

Specialty channels are driving documentary production, says Menard. ‘Most [specialties] are broadcasting documentaries, maybe because that’s their specialization, so they want people to know more about a subject. I think there are lots of documentaries on history because people enjoy that. People want to know more about their own history.’

Likewise, Brooke Stevenson, library manager of Chisholm Archives, a broad-based Toronto stock library, reports an appreciable tendency toward the historical.

‘Lots of stuff on Canadian history is going out the door now. I guess because of the millennium, people want to make points about what happened in the last millennium. They like to contrast stock with more contemporary footage. So the program in which the stock is being used doesn’t have to be a historical documentary.’

Meanwhile, sales are up. ‘It’s usually getting better,’ says Stevenson. ‘We find we have more licensing sales rather than just sending out a screener, probably because people have bigger budgets now or put in a budget for stock footage whereas before they didn’t. There’s not a lot of education out there about what stock footage is. People ring me with no idea of how it works. I think slowly people are working out what it is.’

However, as demand for stock grows, smaller players are being pushed to the sides. Producer John Wesley Chisholm of Eco-Nova Multimedia Productions in Halifax bemoans the rise of ‘one-stop shopping.’

The stock component of Eco-Nova’s business – which Chisholm estimates at about 5% of their overall business – is specifically targeted around a catalogue of underwater footage, much of it hived off from various projects the company has worked on over the years.

‘After getting requests for the footage, we realized we had a resource and something we could put a value on, and with some marketing we could make some hay out of it. And that turned out to be true to a certain extent,’ says Chisholm.

‘I wonder about the place for specialized footage. It’s an arduous process looking for a specific piece of stock footage. People come to us with very specific requirements. They’ll say, ‘We need five minutes of dolphins in front of the bow of a metal ship. And can the ship be blue?’ There is still a place in the market for niche players. I think in Canada we have the underwater things sewn up.’

And will this growing need for stock see the Internet come into its own as a means of distribution?

Of the Internet, Menard says at the moment it is a useful tool for contact and nothing else. ‘People can reach you more easily in the sense that they have access to a data base 24/7. We all know people are working at night and during weekends, and it gives them the opportunity to know if we do have the footage.’

For now, the nfb’s Internet presence is limited to an online catalogue. ‘It gives you a description of the material’s content and physical format, so if you want to see it you have to order a viewing tape,’ says Menard. ‘It’s really like the old way. We’re not making any electronic delivery at this point – it’s something that we’re thinking about.’

While Eco-Nova has a Web page capable of keyword searches and thumbprint displays, it has not reached the stage where footage can be accessed from the Net. As it stands, the page ‘may save [customers] having to get a screener with nothing on it they really want,’ says Chisholm.

Delivery medium, new market or merely an alternative to a phone call, one player points to the Internet as injecting a more off-the-wall sensibility into the process.

Stephen Parr, director of Oddball Film + Video, which was involved in contributing footage to Ron Mann’s doc Grass, says the call for offbeat material – of the kind Oddball specializes in – is more pronounced than ever now as television seeks to compete with the Net.

‘A younger generation of people who are hip to the Internet are starting to produce,’ says Parr. ‘If you turn on the tv or look on the Internet, you’ll notice the kinds of commercials we see right now are completely cut differently using different types of imagery [than in times past]. Technology has changed so much; people are more used to seeing a lot of images. They want to see things that are more unconventional. People are so inundated with the same images over and over again that they’re looking for something unique to cut through the tedium.’ *