thebrendanleonard.show + BLSHD

TV show restoration and archival project [ONGOING]

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tools/skills used: FFmpeg, QTGMC, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, Handbrake, MKVToolNix, HTML

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Back in 2015 I reached out to Brendan Leonard, a person that I only “knew” from his TV show that I watched on ABC Family after swim team back in the summer of 2003.

At some point during college I had added him as a “friend” on Facebook—back when you could just click “Add Friend” on someone who you absolutely were not friends with and they’d probably add you because it seemed fun. And after moving to Chicago after graduation, I ran into him at a comedy show one night and got a photo with him. I used to watch that guy and his friends goof off on TV a decade earlier. What a trip.

Not long after, I sent him a message on Facebook. “Hey, remember me, the guy you don’t know who asked you for a photo the other night after the Comedy Bang Bang show at the Athenaeum? Here’s a seven-paragraph-long message.” I was hoping he still had the full episodes of The Brendan Leonard Show—only clips of it had ever been uploaded here and there, and I was determined to find it. I wanted to watch it again, archive it, preserve it, and ideally make it available online for people like me who had such fond memories of it.

Instead of ignoring my entirely-too-long Facebook message like any normal person would have, Brendan worked with me to try to figure out a way to make this happen. There was a rendezvous at a bar, an exchange of some hard drives, and the entrusting of a grocery bag of what was left of the official show merchandise. Truly surreal. I had been appointed as the Brendan Leonard Show archivist.

After extracting the low-quality episodes that someone had clearly DVR’d and turned into a custom DVD, re-encoding them, and titling them, I had the complete set of all 40 episodes of the show in my local library. As far as I was concerned, part one of what I had set out to do was done, and it felt good.

I launched thebrendanleonard.show on August 6, 2018 with streamable embeds of the show hosted through a throwaway Google account. Brendan posted it on his socials and people got to enjoy it for a few days before the Google account got mad about the streaming and nuked most of the episodes. The website is still up as it has been since then, but most of the links are broken save for a few episodes.

Not long after the site launch, Brendan reached out to me with the original episode masters. The quality difference was so crazy that it became the new project by default—this was the version of the show that needed to be preserved. But there was a problem: of the 40 episodes sent in higher quality, one or two were missing. As a completionist, I couldn’t put most of the episodes up in higher quality and sub in one or two that were out of place. I asked him if he could dig further, but he had recently become a dad and understandably had much more important things to focus on. At this point, life had become busy, and without much of a plan going forward, things were put on indefinite hold.

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Brendan and I have stayed in touch over the last 10 years—we follow each other on socials in that interesting, parasocial way. Every now and then I’ve reached out about the plan to pick things back up when I’ve had a little time here or there.

In the last couple months I’ve started experimenting with QTGMC, an encoding process that takes old, interlaced video like the Brendan Leonard Show masters I have (the entire series was shot on DV cameras) and deinterlaces the video to producing a higher resolution and accurately interpolated output. Combining that with some extremely conservative AI upscaling using Topaz Video AI to clear up the digital compression artifacts has produced an image that I’m actually pretty happy about—one of those “the way you remember it looking” situations. My end goal is to be able to share both the as-is master-quality version of the show for archival as well as a gently-upscaled version that looks a little nicer on the HD TVs we all have now.

As of now, Brendan is in the process of getting me the last bits that I need for the full set so I can run all 40 episodes through the same process. He’s also working on a little project of his own that will likely go hand-in-hand with mine. Until then…