Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Getty Images Senior Business Development Manager Emmanuel Prosnier is attending Sunny Side 2022 to drive home to international producers and filmmakers the benefits of archive as well as his company’s offer of “over 480 million visual assets of unmatched depth, breadth and quality.”
This includes 20 million video clips, with more than 8 million clips in 4K, and 135 million images that date back “to the start of photography.” He adds that Getty Images has a database 390,000 contributors across the world, the majority of which provide “user-generated content,” often on their mobile phones, and even from Ukraine and Russia at present.
Prosnier underlines the one-stop shop nature of the partnerships he is looking to forge at SSD, and that conversations will be based less on finding “reactive” solutions in order to plug gaps in the production, rather “proactive” whereby holistic decision-making on archive is agreed from the off. Taking the hypothetical example of a series examining the world’s most venerated holy sites, he explains how he can “potentially give them a hundred percent of the archive they need,” and in some cases 90-95% of entire series would be archive-driven in the first place. “We are discussing with people when they are really at the earliest stage of the project,” says Prosnier.
He also points out that he has been assisting producers who are pitching their new projects at Sunny Side by allowing temporary and free access to hi-res Getty materials to add polish and weight to the presentation. This is designed to generate greater levels of interest among potential financial partners and broadcasters. “It’s really an accompaniment that we now do from the early days until post-production, and potentially the marketing prior to the transmission within the European channels,” Prosnier comments, underlining the company policy to “support documentary producers, researchers and filmmakers helping them tell their stories – from pitch to production.”
“When it comes to specific documentary production, we are working with everyone on any subject,” he says, before adding of the range of archive on offer. “I haven’t yet seen a kind of content we don’t have.”
He further outlines the growing collection that includes footage from partners such as BBC, NBC News, Bloomberg, ITN, NHK, Discovery and Sky News, plus the offline archives of BBC programming and news, ITN and NBC News. “And when it comes to stills, people like Formula One management, UEFA, FIFA… all the football clubs in Europe. So as soon as there’s an event that is happening, it’s a few seconds after a picture has been taken – at the Olympics for example – that is going to be online on our website.”
The company also offers a “proof of concept” service by way of dossiers on key subjects of ongoing interest to docmakers, whereby all the assets on a given topic are gathered together for best use/exploitation. “That proof of concept can be used in the start-up, and for the finance, to go to the channel and say, ‘okay, this is my story, about (let’s give Marilyn Monroe as an example), these are all the elements that I can get from Getty Images that are going to [provide] images for the narrative.’”
“It’s something that, as soon as we are in the early days of a new relation with a producer, we can create with our internal researchers,” Prosnier adds.
Another key consideration of Prosnier is the enormous carbon footprint that the film industry leaves on the planet. These days it isn’t necessary to send a film crew across the world to “shoot penguins in Cape Town” when such footage already exists in archive, he maintains. And use of archive can save greatly on production costs.
All this will be underlined to producers during Sunny Side, but another very fundamental need will be met during the event, Prosnier argues. Yes, the company has seen much growth during the pandemic as producers turned to archive in great numbers, but it’s time to engage once more in face-to-face dialogue. “It’s meeting new people, because there are a lot of new companies that are going there for the first time. But it’s also taking this opportunity to meet people again in an event where it’s super important to share ideas…but outside of the Zoom call!” Prosnier concludes.
