Our News  

'The Apartment' wins Best Upgrade at the Home Media Awards!

Apr 26 2018

Arrow Academy’s Blu-ray release of The Apartment, graded and restored by our team, has won the Best Upgrade award at the Home Media Awards!

Written, directed, and produced by Billy Wilder, The Apartment was a sweeping sensation in the award season of 1960, nominated for ten Academy Awards and winning five. Leading actors Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon both won BAFTAs and Golden Globes for their performances, and the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine deemed The Apartment to be the 14th greatest film of all time.

Gerry Gedge, our Head of Grading, had this to say about colour grading The Apartment:

“It was an honour to be involved with Arrow Academy on the grading of this classic film. The challenge was not only to improve on previous releases, which was helped by having access to the original negatives, but to convey the different moods portrayed within the movie.”

Richard Watson, our Head of Restoration, had this to say about restoring The Apartment:

“It took about a month to restore The Apartment. It was the first ‘Best Film’ Oscar winner I’d worked on and by that very nature it’s one of the greatest films of all time, so it was an honour to do. Parts of it needed a lot of restoration work but other parts weren’t too bad. There were translucent chemical marks on the original negative that didn’t have a sharp enough edge to be corrected by the automatic dirt restoration, so I had to clean them up manually. They were more noticeable on the light shots than the darker ones, and some frames had multiple artefacts that needed attention.

By Jenny Collins