This brings us to part two of why the film’s release is interesting. The other compelling tale around Vengeance Trail is the behind-the-scenes story of the origin of the film, which begins back in the early aughts. For what started as essentially a student film, the ambitious young filmmakers enlisted their cast and crew to work for extra wages. It was shot on video in a format meant for broadcast television: standard-definition interlaced video. This was good for 2006 TV but would not work for a feature film.
Producer Ian Eyre described his journey of digital film restoration in a compelling article he wrote for Hollywood in Toto: “I learned that there were ways to de-interlace old footage and blow up the picture by creating new pixels instead of stretching them. I started collecting the assets from the movie, but they were incomplete due to hard drive crashes. Then, Artificial Intelligence tools began to appear. I made up my mind to do a test with the trailer. I would drop the trailer from the DVD into my timeline and align the original footage on top, then see what that looked like, blown up to 1080p HD. I was elated. The new trailer looked great.”
“…well worth the time for film lovers to enjoy a regular old Western action-adventure movie…”
Eyre went on to discuss issues they had getting permits for the requisite old-west firearms on the set in the article. He says, “…In fact, we couldn’t get insurance for our blank-firing, vintage guns due to the recent (enough) death of Brandon Lee on “The Crow,” until we hired a Civil War reenactor for squibs and got his insurance.” These same issues have been brought to mind recently, especially regarding the fatalities on the set of Rust. One would think we’d have worked out the live arms protocol after all this time, but a protocol only works when it is adhered to.
Using the emerging techniques available, Eyre created a new version of the film that looks incredible and fits modern film standards for aspect ratio, image quality, and color. This is a fascinating act of film-craft post-production engineering and suggests that old films, perhaps even ones that were never released, can be resurrected and brought up to date. This is like finding a time capsule of film in suspended animation and being able to restore it in a way that makes it accessible to a new audience.
Vengeance Trail is well worth the time for film lovers to enjoy a regular old Western action-adventure movie while also appreciating the technical advances that enable the creation of a real film out of an incomplete set of digital footage shot using dated standards.
"…Western shoot-em-up in the style of old film serials..."
