Over the summer, my blogs tend to get quiet. Summer is my time for vacations and relaxing and not working on projects. But, this summer, I was presented with a really kind of neat genealogy related project. My aunt sent me about 50 rolls of 8MM film that belonged to my uncle. It's all from the early to mid 50s and chronicles the lives of my mom, her brothers and my grandparents during that time. Having never met my grandfather, I'm pretty excited about the prospect of seeing him in motion.
At first, I thought this would be easy peasy. Just snag a projector and watch it, with an ultimate goal of digitizing it. But the more the process has unfolded, the more it is like a treasure hunt with this end goal of having a good quality representation of this era of life in my family.
8MM film, while all the rage in the 50s and 60s, is not used any more. It hasn't been used since about then. So the equipment and supplies are tough to come by and the knowledge of how to use and maintain them properly is sparse. The particular films I'm working with don't appear to have been kept very well... although, to be fair, it doesn't seem like proper film storage supplies are plentiful and at the time, I doubt anyone thought someone would be struggling to watch them 60 years later. So the films themselves need some maintenance before they can really be watched - including cleaning, lubricating (who knew film needed lubrication!?) and potentially repair.
