Photos of nearly 20,000 items related to renowned filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, including his handwritten storyboards, scripts and production notes, were put on the Internet in an online archive Tuesday.
Many of the items in the Kurosawa Digital Archive are being shown to the public for the first time, according to film company Kurosawa Production Inc., which kept the creations. Kurosawa's eldest son, Hisao, heads the company.
The items include photos of scenes of such Kurosawa masterpieces as "Seven Samurai" and "Rashomon."
The nearly 20,000 items are part of some 27,000 that Ryukoku University in Kyoto helped convert into digital files.
"This material can help people learn about the logic of creating something," Hisao Kurosawa told reporters. "I hope we will be able to provide this archive in foreign languages such as English."
The archive Web site is at www.afc.ryukoku.ac.jp/Komon/kurosawa/index.html