hi i’m so sorry if this is weird! i saw your post about doing some film archive work and i wanted to ask a little about it if you have the time, like qualifications, education, what the job’s like and how you liked it, etc. i’m finishing up a major in studio art and minor in film right now and my original career plan will not be possible for at least a good while, so i’ve been considering other options. 90% of my experience is in library work so film archiving seemed like a good option!
thank you for taking the time to read and do feel free to ignore this message if you don’t have the time or just don’t want to! have a good day!
Hi! No worries, I don't mind answering questions, though I don't know how helpful my answers will be.
I didn't realize until after making my post about my job that most film archiving jobs do require some sort of qualifications such as a degree or certificate, and that our job not requiring that sort of thing is probably one reason they were able to get away with paying us so little. That said, I've heard similar things about getting library work-- that there are people who get degrees in library science and they are able to be hired to be librarians in an official capacity, but other jobs with similar duties may not require the same training. So maybe you will have resources I didn't, through your experience in library work! It is also possible that I am talking nonsense. To the extent that I had any qualifications, they consisted of 1. an art degree (sequential art), and 2. hands-on experience shooting film and developing it in my sink, but many of my coworkers had no prior experience with film that I know of and just happened to answer the job posting.
I did enjoy my job for the most part, though like any job a lot of the day-to-day experience of it is the people, and it became pretty dull after most of my favorite coworkers moved on and management started getting megalomaniacal about productivity. (I think this sort of thing is antithetical to the practice of conservation but as I've established, my lab was not... standard.) It was really cool getting to work with film every day though, and I got to see some really fascinating things (the Kinsey work, but also old instructional programs and silent films, and very occasionally people's home movies).
My duties involved inspecting the film for damage, cleaning and repairing it, noting down metadata about the film as an object (for example whether it's an original or a print, negative or positive, what film stock, whether it has sound), and then determining the appropriate frame rate and scanning it at our very fancy scanner machines. Sometimes I'd get to do color correction and I really enjoyed that. After that point, scanning usually entailed watching the film at slightly faster than normal speed as it ran through the scanner, and keeping an eye out for any debris we'd missed at a previous stage in the process or anything going wrong with the scanner. Sometimes film would be very warped and that would make scanning difficult; a couple times a film popped clean off the scanner and multiple people needed to hold it in place while one unlucky worker wound it back up by hand. We had special metal plates to hold warped film in place, but sometimes hubris got the better of us and we didn't use them when we should've. Also, they would make horrible rhythmic squeaking noises for the duration of the scanning process.
This was really long but I guess the takeaway is: it's fun work if you can get it, but I have no idea how I got it.
Also: lab safety is very important! If, for instance, your incompetent boss spills a huge drum of perchloroethylene and rushes in to try to clean it up bare-handed with some paper towels, you should perhaps consider calling multiple workplace safety organizations about it. That's what we did.
