Just asking. I inherited this great big pile of 8mm film recordings made by my grandfather and father in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, which were pretty much unviewable — have you got an 8mm projector lying around? So I dropped them off at a Walmart Photocenter along with $650 to have them converted to digital. They’re sitting in Seattle right now, and I thought it would be a while until I could see them…but, you know, digital, so I just got an email saying I could view them over this thing called the internet.
Oh my god.
There’s my childhood, laid out in grainy, poorly lit, soundless, washed-out color. Christmases and camping trips, my great-grandparents alive again, my grandfather looking hale and sober, my grandmother middle-aged and strong, my father digging clams and picking up his kids, my mother in her 20s looking good, and all my siblings back again. I only had a few minutes to skim through these hours of film, but later I’ll have to watch them thoroughly and wallow in the old days.
Here, for instance, is me hugging my late brother sometime in the early 1960s.
If I’m found dead, drowned in a puddle of tears later this week, you’ll know what happened.
I’m going to upload these many recordings to YouTube to make them accessible to the rest of my family — no one else in the world will care but these are like jewels of ancient cinematography to me.
As a matter of fact I do have an 8mm projector lying around. I also have a bunch of reels that have not been viewed for decades and even though I do have a projector I probably will just have a service digitize them for me. I am both looking forward to seeing them and also dreading that.
There’s family photos I remember looking at decades ago — I have no idea where they are now. At least some of them are probably in my house and buried under other stuff that I have to sort through…
I’ve ended up inheriting a huge pile of family photographs.
No one else wanted them, mostly because everyone else is now dead.
Some of the oldest date back to Europe and the 19th century and are of relatives that I’m not even sure who they are.
I inherited the family photo albums and scanned all the images so that all of my siblings could have a copy. Lots and lots of photos.
goddamn that is sentimental, might take out some of us with the splash damage. im dyin.
PZ, I’m glad you are able to have those important vignettes of your family. But:
PZ wrote: I’m going to upload these many recordings to YouTube
I reply: just remember while youboob says you can ‘own the copyright’ to them, youboob can sell or give them to anyone for any use (bizarre, maybe even nefarious (obscene) animations) and they will feed the insatiable theft by LLM and AI systems.
I bought an 8mm Sony Camcorder in the early 90’s and was gently ribbed by my family for doing so.
Now we are so glad as we footage of kids who are now in their mid 30’s when they were young. Also we have footage of family members no longer with us.
My parents also took a lot of photos when we were growing so we have a lot from the 70′ thru to 90’s.
So great to have a bit of a family archive.
I have made most of my camcorder footage available as unlisted on YT so family members can view anytime with a link.
Hey Dr. Myers, I also have old silent 8-mm home movies from the 1950s. I remember growing up basically in the tavern that my parents frequented, and that’s where most of the movies were shot. What a damned waste to see myself as a child experiencing a bunch of blithering beer sots and not knowing any better. Screw the past and forget about it.
You could just send your relatives the same link you have.
The point about unlabelled pictures that @7 makes is real. You may be the only person still alive who remembers who these people are – perhaps leave some notes.
My family has a big book of who-the-hell are these relatives?
Luckily it isn’t fatal, it just feels that way as your heart alternates between breaking from grief and swelling with joy.
@6 At some point in the future I’m going to see that photo and will be asked to click on the squares that contain a sidewalk.
I’m another one who still has an 8mm projector (I also have the camera…). My father was taking 8mm movies in 1940s, so the the really early stuff is black & white. The original Kodachrome for 8mm had the awesome ISO rating of…8. Not too long after that, Kodak managed to get it up to 10.
There was another solution: my grandfather had this awesome light bar with these huge incandescent lamps. He’d plug that thing in and the whole family was blinded while he made the recording.
My family (Dad) had (has still?) an old slide projector and family slides from back in the early 1970’s..
You could have bought a projector and saved 500+ dollars
So nice! Our granddad was an enthusiastic filmmaker. He also loved cars, and many of his films were of cars (which were rare back then) that happened to pass the house. No idea where the films are now. I guess one of our cousins has them.
I had kind of a similar experience last year when my Dad passed away at 92. He was a lifelong photographer, but luckily, in his retirement he had digitized all of his slides. The problem I had was finding those digitized photos on the various hard drives and SD cards he left behind. Once I found them, I looked at every shot from the 1950s through the 80s, mainly looking for pictures that included him (rare – he was always the photographer) to put together a retrospective slide show for his memorial service. In the end, I was also able to copy all of them USB thumb drives so that each of my sisters could also have a copy.
My grandfather had a projector, which meant that the only time we could see these recordings was at his house, when he wanted to. Putting them on the internet will make them available to lots of family members, including the children of my brother Jim and of my sister Lisa, who’d probably like to see their late parent on video. Buying a projector would be selfish and would defer the problem to my heirs, who would be increasingly distant from the people in the recordings, and couldn’t be blamed if they just threw them out.
By the way, I took a look at 8mm cameras and projectors on eBay. They’re dirt cheap! You can pick up used film recorders for $20, but why you’d want to is a mystery to me.
Well on reconsidering I think I will be setting up a screen and watching them to determine if any actually are worth preserving.
It doesn’t have to be YT — take a look at Vimeo if @shermanj’s warning concerns you. But the idea of uploading them for family and friends is in general a good one for another reason: you’ll have the family’s collective assistance in identifying people, places, and events. At their leisure they can fill in names, “Oh that was Aunt Clara, spring 75” etc.
I envy you for having all those recordings. I’m quite sentimental myself, constantly replaying memories from the past in my mind. It makes sense why I take so many videos and pictures of my son now, but sadly, I’m rarely in the frame. Maybe I should start including myself in the photos and videos so that when my son is grown up, he can look back at the moments we shared together.