Problem: In mid 1980, a collection of fourteen well preserved race films, produced in the 1930s and 1940s by black filmmakers for black audiences, was donated to the G. William Jones Film & Video Collection in the Hammond Arts Library at Southern Methodist University. Nearly twenty years later, the university decided that this important collection of film history needed to be made available to libraries, schools and museums across the state of Texas. The university needed an experienced multimedia producer to digitally transfer and encode the films and place them in a DVD set for distribution.

Solution: Eternal Interactive created a three DVD set of the Tyler Black Film Collection. Each film was painstakingly color adjusted and transferred to high quality digital media. Five-hundred and fifty-three minutes of footage was then encoded in DVD 9 and DVD 5 formats. In addition to the films themselves, Eternal Interactive produced a series of interviews with SMU film history professors who comment on each film. Films and commentaries are accessible on the DVDs through a unique, animated, black-and-white 3D menu environment that represents a 1940s cinema. The DVD set also contains an attractive liner notes booklet describing the collect film by film. One thousand copies of the collection are being used by museums, schools and libraries statewide.

On the web: www.smu.edu/blackfilms