I came to filmmaking late in my academic career, so it was without any formal photography training and during my first year of film school that I set out to learn best archival practices, digitization techniques, and the ins and outs of small format filmmaking.While there’s no substitute for learning hands-on through trial, error and frustration as I did, the following is a collection of websites and online resources that most helped me as I stumbled through the first phase of preservation:

Working with Home Movies

General Interest & Footage Sources

Home & Amateur – A blog about home movies and amateur film, whose contributors hail from the Center for Home Movies.

Lost in Light – The documentation of a (now complete) free home movie transfer project, including home movies, categorized by topic, many of them available for Creative Commons remixing.

Prelinger Archives/Archive.Org - A collection of home movies includes amateur films and videotapes from the collections of the Center for Home Movies, the Prelinger archives, other home movie aficionados. Many of the movies are public domain or available for use under Creative Commons guidelines.

Supplies & Small Format Filmmaking Resources

Film Shooting – A great online source for news about all things home movies and small format filmmaking based in Norway. Given that two major print publications (Super8Today and SmallFormat) have shut down their presses in the last year, this online news pool is essential.

On Super 8 – This site bills itself as “impartial and comprehensive resources for today’s Super 8 and 8mm small gauge film makers.” It’s all that and more; based in the UK.

Pro8mm- The only movie house I know of in the US that specifically specializes in Super-8 film stocks and transfers. In 2008, they added a Milliennium II Scanner with daVinci 2K color corrector to their transfer menu, capable of SD or HD scans. It’s the premier scanning system for small  gauge film.

Super 8 Site – A German Super8 site. The “links and addresses” page is worth a look.

Urbanski Film – Though the website screams 1990s, I’ve ordered and been very pleased with film cleaning supplies, projector bulbs, and other hard-to-find small format equipment.

And though it goes without saying, eBay is an immense (if risky) resource for finding old Super 8 cameras and projectors, as well as professional VHS decks for digitizing old videocasettes.  Before purchasing the unknown, I’ve found the folks on the AMIA Small Gauge/Amateur Film Interest Group listserve to be incredibly helpful and willing to share their expertise.

Preservation & Care Information

Brodsky & Treadway -The transfer house for rare, valuable, and fragile home movies. Their companion site, Little Film, contains detailed, downloadable tips and instructions for caring for home movies.

Home Movie Day – A major project of the Center for Home Movies, Home Movie Day is an international celebration of home movies. The site contains lots of information about film handling and care as well as links to home movie day events across the country and the globe. Home Movie Day also keeps a running list of home movie transfer houses.

National Film Preservation Foundation – A clearinghouse of film care basics and resources for more advanced users. Be sure to download their extensive film preservation guide.

If there are other resources you’d like to know about, leave a comment below and I’ll share what info I might have!

As part of the panel, I’ll share clips of For Memories’ Sake and also tips and tricks for finding and using archival home movie footage in independent films.

Panel Description: Super 8 is the OG of guerilla filmmaking. Find out how you can make this beautiful, classic film gauge work in an HD world. From finding a camera to choosing film stock, scanning and encoding options, inclusive workflows, tips that make the difference and more. These aren’t your grandpa’s home movies…

Panelists:

Philip Vigeant – Pro8mm
Adam Garner – Trigger Studios
Branden Lower – A Bryan Photo
Ashley Maynor – Preservation Project Films

Add it to your SXSW schedule here!

For Memories’ Sake – Official Trailer from Ashley Maynor on Vimeo.

The trailer for my upcoming documentary, For Memories’ Sake, is now online! Spread the word and become a fan on Facebook.

You can catch a sneak preview of my latest documentary, For Memories’ Sake this Saturday, August 8th, at 1:30 pm at the Nims Theater at the University of New Orleans. The screening is part of a faculty juried showcase at the 2009 University Film and Video Association conference. Please come if you’re attending!

If you can’t make the screening, you can still find out more about the movie by following my posts that have just begun on the blog at Self-Reliant Film, where I recount the making of the movie. More will follow in the coming weeks!

More photos of the exhibition can be viewed here.

Many thanks to Paul Harrill, who helped me mount over 100 lbs of galvanized steel to the walls and rig a projector, to Sarah Garrison and Lindsay Mitchell, who spent hours hanging photographs with me in a cold studio, and to Brian Counihan, who gave me free use of his warehouse studio and pushed me to put on the exhibition in the first place.

Over the past two years, I have been working on a documentary about my grandmother, Angela Singer. A Southern homemaker and photo hobbyist, Angela has taken over 150,000 strange and wonderful photographs (approximately 12 a day) for the last 30 years.

Before getting her first still camera, Angela relied solely on home movies to document the minutia of her everyday existence –shooting some 79 reels on 8mm and Super-8. I began this blog, in part, to document the process of preserving those home movies and transferring them to digital video. That preservation project blossomed into a full fledged documentary and the monumental task of documenting and preserving my grandmother’s entire photo collection.

Angela can and does take pictures of everything she encounters in her day-to-day, from checks she receives in the mail to the five o’clock news broadcast on her living room TV. As she told me on camera in one of our many interviews, “My camera never leaves my side. I even take it with me to the mailbox.”

It’s amazing to me that I went years without thinking my grandmother was doing anything out of the ordinary. For me and for my family, her picture-taking has just been an accepted fact–something that we’re so used to that we hardly even notice it at all.

Nevertheless, after I began making films of my own I rediscovered my grandmother’s photo obsession and saw how extraordinary her practice of photography really is. This process of unwrapping my grandmother’s photo hobby and unraveling her dual identity as Southern grandma and outsider artist has allowed me to more fully discover myself: why I make films, why I feel such a compulsion to preserve what I feel is important. My documentary is, in many ways, an essay about this discovery and finding myself in the reflection of my grandmother’s lens.

To serve both the documentary and my goal of preserving my grandmother’s collection, each time I’ve made the trek home to Joelton, Tennessee, during the past few years, I’ve brought home plastic bins of photos, albums, and VHS-C video tapes. Since those first few trips, I have managed to scan and digitize some 30,000 photographs of my grandmother’s ever-growing collection. Of those, I’ve sorted 1,500 that I found striking, moving, or just plain weird:

Sorting and sifting Angela’s images has almost become an obsession in and of itself. The more I look at her photos, the more I want them to be seen–not just by me, but by anyone curious enough to take a look.

Only Strangers Use the Front Door is my attempt to have Angela’s photos seen. This curated installation of 750+ of Angela’s photos and video projection of edited versions of her home movies will open on February 4th. This exhibit is, appropriately, part of Roanoke’s Marginal Arts Festival, a new fringe-style festival in Southwest Virginia that will push the boundaries of what can/should be deemed “art.”

Stay tuned for posts on the opening reception…