One of my earliest memories is being at my grandfather’s watching family cine-films. He had a super-8 camera and projector and would let me handle the reels and feed them into the projector and I’d watch the flickering light catch the white sheet he hung against the wall. These films were magical and provided a window into a past I had not experienced. I saw the significance of preserving them.
At 13 or 14 I had my first computer and with it came Cinemania.
Cinemania was a CD-ROM encyclopedia of film. In effect it was a digital archive and database, with every known film up to that point catalogued, with actor bios, images and in some cases trailers for the films. This is in the years before i discovered the internet and IMDB. I could sit night after night for hours scouring the encyclopaedia looking for films, actors, watching trailers over and over again.
At this time I decided to ask my grandfather if I could borrow his cine-camera because I wanted to try making a film, I’d even built a set from a large cardboard box and I’d seen enough Tony Hart and Morph and of course Wallace and Gromit to know I wanted to give it a shot.
I spoke to him on a Friday in January 1997, begging him to lend me the cine-camera. He agreed, I just needed to arrange collecting it from him. What he didn't tell me was that it was very hard to come by super-8 film, and that making anything in stop-motion would be difficult in that format as they only run to a few minutes and if you make a mistake you cant rewind and re-record. Tragically my grandfather died the following Monday so i never got to collect the camera from him or talk more about film.
I did however continue my pursuit of making a film and coaxed a sympathetic Art teacher to help me make a stop-motion film for a history project instead using a video camera. #eraseandrewind :-)
Some years later after graduating from my first degree and before starting my MA in International Film I went back to my grandfather’s cine-films looking for inspiration to make a music video. I found some were on magnetic tape, some still on reels, and I transferred a few of them to my computer editing them into a music video I was making for a song I had written and recorded.
I realise now in hindsight, at the point where I now I want to work in archiving, that everything I had been doing in the years leading up to now had pointed in this direction from earliest handling of reels, to the transfer of tapes to the editing and curating of film.
Since then I have enrolled on an Adobe Premiere course in conjunction with an internship at a film production company, learning about aspect ratios and export formats and I wrote an essay on digitalisation in broadcasting. During my internship I was also part of a small and dedicated team exporting films from Final Cut. Together we updated the production company website with videos and helped market an up and coming short film.
In 2015 I contacted the North East Film Archive NEFA and asked to visit the archive and learn about archiving. I thoroughly enjoyed spending a day being mentored by David Parsons. He showed me their film storage facilities, and taught me about different physical formats, showing me how the technology had adapted. I got to see a Steenbeck in action and looked at their tape transfer and editing suites.
One of the many things I learned from this experience was the anthropological value of film, that from any source, home movies, news reels, fiction and non-fiction they were all part of a dialogue which helped to preserve personal and collective cultural memories. I learned that discovering, preserving and making available film helps reconstruct and understand our past and therefore better anticipate the future.
In September 2015 I applied to Film London through Creative Skillset to take part in Film London’s Volunteering in Film Archives training at Birkbeck College learning about the role of archives, including film handling, identification and collection policies including copyright and ownership.
A fascinating seminar led by Amanda Huntley of Huntley Archives and one from the Imperial War Museum left me with no doubt this was a career path I wanted to take.
Due to unforeseen circumstances I had to leave the Film London course at week 5, as I had self-funded my ten weeks there and was living in Marlborough and working in a bar to make extra money. The pub, managed by a family friend closed down and I had nowhere else to stay.
I knew that I should persevere and advise any one with the same passion to do so. There are always more opportunities to learn. I am hoping at this moment to seek more opportunities in training or placements in archives.
theartofmadeline
gamechangershow
pixelskylines
titsay
gummygunk
areudirty