The British Film Update 1Mar2013

It’s just over a month until the release of the first titles in our eagerly anticipated range of British Films and we’re getting a lot of positive feedback from both customers and retailers.

The slimline packaging, in particular, has come in for praise – its non-standard appearance and small footprint ensuring that it immediately stands out from other releases and that more of them can fit on one’s shelves. The overall look and feel for these titles is something we’ve been working on very hard to ensure that they are all stylish and in tune with the era in which the films were made. For the most part this means repurposing the original theatrical quad designs but, where those aren’t available or appropriate, we’ve been creating new designs in the style of the era in which each film was made, giving the whole package a nice retro touch. Here’s a working example for the April release of Man at the Top:

As you can see from the back cover, even though these titles are cheaply priced, as well as containing new transfers wherever possible they also contain any special features that we can unearth. Man at the Top, for example, contains the as-filmed full frame version of the movie and a music suite (more about these over the next few weeks) alongside a stills gallery, theatrical trailer and a PDF of the original promotional brochure – that’s pretty good going for £9.99 RRP.

It would obviously have been much easier and cheaper to use whatever existing material was lying on the archive shelves, releasing these films with no special features and little care, but we feel strongly that our cinematic heritage should, at the very least, be treated in the same way in which we here at Network treat our televisual one. It seems we’re not the only ones who feel this way, as a two page article in this month’s Sight & Sound demands to know why so much British cinema is still absent from DVD.

Expect more coverage on these films in the next few weeks in the build up to their release, with some background on the transfer work that we’ve done, the can of worms about aspect ratios, music suites and much more!

Check out the entire range of upcoming British Films here.