Analog media formats like film and videotape are how vast amounts of the movie industry’s history have been stored. But those formats have a shelf life, and if not kept in the right conditions, they could have their lives cut short.
However, inside the former Farm Credit Bank Building in downtown Wichita, lies a laboratory where films are being restored to their former glory. Here, a frame of film is not just worth a thousand words, but approximately 17 megabytes of server space.
“I mean, film lasts a long time, but it doesn't last forever, and tape lasts even less amount of time than film does,” Shawn Rhodes said. “So if you don't digitize it, you're going to lose that film or video, which you know, if you look at museums, that could be our human history of the United States of America for the last 150 years.”
Rhodes is the director of digital Services of the U.S. division of R3store Studios. This division was purchased in 2024 by Underground Vaults & Storage, which is based in the salt mines in Hutchinson. Dan Reisig, who is the vice president of technology for UV&S, said that the same six families have owned the company since 1959 and that their field is very specialized.
“Secure storage is what we're mostly known for,” Reisig said. “But we are a security company in the oddest way in that we take care of not only paper and books and things like that, we also do many, many, many warehouses full of video, tape and film.”
Much of American life in the 20th century was recorded on film and video tape. Many filmmakers today not only still use it to capture a specific look for an image, but film masters continue to be utilized for archival purposes. Together, UV&S and R3store Studios offer clients a way to maintain and update their assets.
“The good news about being in the salt mine: it offers inexpensive, long term, very steady temperature and humidity,” Reisig said. ‘So that's really what it is. The space is relatively inexpensive. We're not building buildings. We're just basically occupying spaces that’ve been mined out.”
Once a customer decides to have their assets stored at UV&S, the company will inventory what they have turned in. Down the line, if they decide that they would like the footage to go through an extensive restoration process, they also offer that as a service.
“It will be securely transported on a UV&S vehicle, under our security, and dropped off here at R3store Studios [in Wichita]. We'll digitize it. We'll upload your videos to the web, if that's what you want — to a secure cloud. We'll put them on our drive or USB, however you would like it. And then once we're finished, we let them know to come pick it up.”
One of the perks of the job for Reisig and Rhodes is that they are constantly finding cool artifacts in the salt mine, many of which they have to keep secret out of discretion for their high-profile clients. Something they can talk about is the legendary Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense.”
“The negative, amazingly, was in a warehouse in Kansas,” Talking Heads band member Jerry Hendersen said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last year.
“It was down in the salt mine,” Rhodes said.
“It was a part of that material that got separated from ownership that's been sitting on pallets for about a decade,” Reisig said. “Found it, repatriated it to them, and they were extremely grateful to get it back.
