This blog was begun in 2006 in part to detail the process of preserving my grandmother’s home movies. That preservation project grew into two local Home Movie Day events, a brief stint as a library archivist, and, most recently, a half-hour documentary (now in post-production) about my extraordinary grandmother, a Southern homemaker who has taken at least a dozen photos a day for the last thirty plus years, amassing an archive of over 150,000 photographs.

In the coming weeks, I’ll revisit the long and sometimes tedious process of caring for my grandmother’s photo and home movie collections, and I’ll reflect upon the process of making this film about her, a project that slowly came into being over the last three years.

(The wonderful poster art for For Memories’ Sake is the work of Adam Ewing at Yee-Haw Industries.)

In the many months since my last post, I have slaved away at organizing the 70-odd home movies given to me by my grandmother. In order to keep track of all the footage contained in her home movies, both for the sake of archiving and to help me use that footage in new media and film projects of my own, I created a simple database in Filemaker Pro. It looks like this:

I designed the database to suit my various needs. As you can see from the data fields above, I can sort and search films by date, keyword, handwritten descriptions my grandmother wrote on the film reels, film quality, and persons who appear in the film. I also included reel numbers I assigned to each individual reel as well as numbers given to the new 400ft feels the films were spooled onto when I had them transferred to video.

Thanks to Home Movie Depot, for the very reasonable fee of $25, I also have several hundred digital stills taken every 10 seconds during the transfer of each reel of 8mm and Super 8 film. After reviewing all the stills for each roll, I chose the most representative and/or memorable images from each reel to be the three identifying stills in my database.

If you’re eager to get started on organizing some home movies of your own, it’s the perfect time. International Home Movie Day is just around the corner. If you’re in the Southwest Virginia area, stop by the Lyric Theatre, where I’ll be hosting my very first home movie day event!