Most are too young to remember the popularity of home made movies using 8mm film. Kodak, Bell & Howell, and others made cameras that created movies on either black and white film or color film (later) that was 8mm wide. These cameras shot scenes at about 17 frames per second, which is fast enough so that when shown with a projector on a screen, the motion was reasonably smooth and not jerky. This era lasted until the video camera completely displaced the film movie camera. Now, even digital cameras can take either still pictures or videos, so even the video camera is on the way to history.
From all this movie making during the last half of the last century, there remain many reels of film of family gatherings, young children taking their first steps, graduation day, etc and these reels now sit in back closets----too valuable to throw away but too costly to see on the screen. What a dilemma. I have such a collection, perhaps 40 reels of film dating back to 1956. Most are labelled with insufficient information, and some may be in a state of decomposition, as I will soon learn.
Here is just one example of the Kodak mailer carton with one small reel---they were all small considering that the film reel had to fit inside the camera---that contained maybe 10 minutes of moving photography. The label shows the date, who operated the camera, but no indication of the content. This box is about 2.5 inches square. There are 40 of them to review.
Okay, how to review to determine if the content is of interest for family archives? There are two ways, both dependent on the film being in good physical shape and the images not decomposed. One way is to enlist the service of a copying company to run the film through a digitizer and copy the images onto a CD or a thumb drive. This method has two problems, both cost related. The processing fee would amount to about $15 per reel and related to this is the uncertainty of the content before committing to the expenditure of $15 per reel.
The other method is to find a film projector from the used and antique market that is in adequate condition to show the films on the screen to determine, at least, the content before getting interested in preservation of a copy. Workable projectors are not easy to find and most have some uncertainty of producing good results. But even after viewing on a screen, there is no permanent copy.
Then logic comes into play regarding the assessment and preservation of valuable scenes.
It all involves motion of the subjects and in the early days of amateur movie makers, that important point was overlooked. To the point, what good is ten seconds (170 frames) of a motion picture if the subject is motionless? I do recall my dad showing some of his movies to the family in the 1950s. One of his scenes was a group of relatives at a family reunion. They were all standing stark still for the first five seconds of the movie and then, as if by some command, they randomly swapped places with each other while the movie camera caught all this. Then for the last 5 seconds of the movie, they all stood still again. When this segment was over, we curiously asked dad why they all moved around and his reply was that as I was taking this movie, I said to them, "hey this is a motion picture and you need to move around and they did".
So, now understanding that most of the movies are in fact protracted stills, I decided I would look for individual frames that may be of some archival value and to capture those individual frames. To do all this, from the inspection of the films, plus the capture of any individual frames, I had to first concoct this homemade structure.
Note the platform with the two posts to support the glass plate and the supply and take-up reels. Important is the circular light to provide uniform lighting of the film along with the white stiff paper backdrop for light reflection. Two other necessities: a jewelers loupe and a high resolution camera with a macro lens for closeup photography of the film strip. The jewelers loupe is to look closely at the frame to see if there is content worth capturing. Other lighting schemes would work such as under lighting and with opal glass for support.
Here is an example of a frame from one of the reels:
Well, it all works fine, revealing the low quality of the images and the preponderance of scenes with no motion. I did find one reel of the last part of the Indianapolis 500 Auto Race where the camera operator was sitting in the stands and most of the scenes showed more of the persons head in front of the camera than that of the race. A problem often encountered with cameras with viewfinders that are not through the lens and so do not represent exactly what is being filmed.
Oh well, so much for archives.
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