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People & Places In The News
IT’SALLABOUTIMAGE
ARISE SIRBILL
Congratulations to Bill Cotton,
a pillar of BBC management from 1956 to 1982 and now chairman of Meridian Broadcasting, who became a Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Eileen Atkins, distinguished actress of stage, screen and television, was named Dame Commander.
To Dudley Moore, Christopher Lee, Googie Withers, writer-director Anthony Minghella and Peter Rogers, former chief executive of the Independent Television Commission, went the CBE.
Pauline Collins, Barry Cryer, sports com- mentator John Motson and Jane Birkin got the OBE, while Gerry Anderson, who created Thunderbirds, as well as other cult TV favourites like Stingray, Joe 90, Supercar, Four Feather Falls and Captain Scarlet, received the MBE.
AND...LEST WE FORGET
The great Everyman actor Jack Lemmon, who was nominated seven times for British Academy Film Awards and won three (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, The China Syndrome), has died at the age of 76.
After barely surviving a screen test in the 50s for an abortive pro-
duction of a Biblical epic Joseph And His Brethen, Lemmon would later admit that he was, in the audi- ence’s mind, strictly a con- temporary actor.
A double Oscar win- ner (Mister Roberts, Save The Tiger), Lemmon said: “I do not believe that any actor, even if he deludes himself he is great, can play any part. There is such a thing as casting. Certain actors in certain parts just don’t belong.”
On the home front, it’s farewell to much loved actresses Joan Sims and Eleanor Summerfield; composer-screen- writer James Bernard; sound man Ken Weston, an Oscar-winner and BAFTA nom- inee earlier this year for Gladiator; cine- matographers David Feig, who lit many fine TV dramas such as The Fortunes Of War, and Sasha Vierney, from Last Year At Marienbad to Prospero’s Books; broad- caster/journalist George Ffitch; and veter- an writer-director Ken Hughes, whose credits include The Trials Of Oscar Wilde, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Cromwell. ■
IT’SALLABOUTIMAGE
Like all great ideas, image.net is brilliant in its simplicity. Founded five years ago by two former Sunday Times’ employ- ees, photographer Simon Townsley and picture editor Aidan Sullivan, the company set out to estab- lish a fast and efficient means of storing and transmitting pictures to a range of media outlets.
“Photographers have been shifting images around electronically, modem to modem, for ages,” says Townsley. “You’d have all this gear out in the field, set up your satellite phone and beam the image back to London. Back then it was 40 dollars a minute, and the image would take 15 or 20 minutes to transmit, and you might be in the mid- dle of some field in Iraq which could be quite tricky.
“I wondered then if there was a way of sending the picture to some central repository, which people could dial into with high speed connections, so they could pick it up when they needed to and you wouldn’t have to send it lots of times.”
From this simple notion sprang image.net, which is fast becoming the entertainment industry standard for distributing pictures to magazines and papers in the UK and beyond.
With a client list that includes most of the major Hollywood film stu- dios, a clutch of satellite TV stations, record labels and even some museums and tourist attractions, the market was evidently ready and waiting.
“It became quite clear that the entertainment industry had a need for the dissemination of this materi- al,” says Townsley, these days the chairman of the company, with Sullivan the director of sales and marketing and Simon Cox fulfilling the CEO duties.
“Very early on we started using the bulletin board system. That launched us into the industry quickly before the internet was reliable enough or fast enough or secure enough. Coming very early to the business, and growing organically we developed this website as a way of moving information around that suited the needs of the industry.”
Developing technology to meet their needs as they went along, image.net have refined the service to offer free access to registered users, magazines, papers and the like, while giving clients the ability to exert control over when and by whom images are used.
“If you’re a picture editor in a hurry you might not know necessarily who the distributor of a particular film is,” Townsley adds. “You’ve just
been told by your editor that
this is a film that’s being
reviewed in the magazine and
your task is to get some great
pictures.
“So you go onto image.net, you click on the film icon and find the pictures you want. It’s as simple as that. If you had to think who the distributor was,
go onto their web- site, log on with a name and password, it may or may not have the images you want or may be in a differ-
ent standard to what you’re used to. With us you just go to one place.”
For the client the benefits include a saving on the cost of duping up and mailing out millions of transparencies, and offers a statistical breakdown of exactly who has downloaded each pic- ture. There is also the ability to set aside certain images for exclusive use by certain maga-
zines. For registered
users the service is
free and offers a
better quality of
image, some of
which are scanned
in directly from first
generation pictures
in the US, than
transparencies or
prints.
As for the future, image.net
have just had a
£10m cash invest-
ment from Palamon
Capital Partners, a venture capital com- pany, and are looking to spend some of
that on maintaining their place ahead of a market they invent- ed.
Just settled into bigger
offices in London, image.net
are also looking to expand in
America where the idea seems
set to revolutionise picture dis-
tribution as much as it has
done here. “It’s a massive oper-
18
ation for a British company,”
Photos top: Image.net’s website;
above: Jack Lemmon in The Front Page (Archive photo courtesy Kobal)