This August I (along with some very dedicated volunteers!) hosted Southwest Virginia’s first-ever Home Movie Day at the historic Lyric Theatre in downtown Blacksburg. Our event this year was smaller than we had hoped but a great first effort.

What was impressive to me about our event was the number of films people brought in. We calculated a total of about 7000 feet of Super 8 and 8mm films. We cleaned a good number of them and selected a reel or two from each person to screen during the event.

One of the volunteers I wrangled into helping me is a librarian in Special Collections at Virginia Tech. I spent the weeks before HMD teaching her what I know about film preservation and I spent several days teaching her how to inspect, clean, repair, and project 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm films. Now she can inspect and project films with the pros! She’s already signed on to help with next year’s event and is eager to take a fresh look at the films in Special Collections.

Because our event audience consisted of an intimate crowd, everyone who came to our Home Movie Day participated in a hands-on workshop where they learned to clean film, cut and splice leader, and how to store their home movies. We also had a highly competitive game of Home Movie Day Bingo where the winners received gift certificates for free film transfers from our generous sponsors, Home Movie Depot and Pro8mm.

During the inspection and screening we encountered films in a wide range of conditions, including:

–some vibrantly colored, pristine Super 8 prints of a Grand Canyon vacation (including a trip to an Indian Reservation with Native Americans selling jewelry), summers at the pool, and a Christmas Day morning

–some 8mm films stored in metal tins in very poor condition with faded, bluish film with crystal formations

–one 16mm print with advanced vinegar syndrome, which presented a great learning opportunity to everyone present.

Though most of the films we screened were your standard swimming pool and football game fair, two participants watched home movies they had never seen before. One gentleman saw his great-grandparents, whom he had never met, during the screening. He’s now on a mission to collect all his family’s home movies to be transferred. Inspiring just one more person to preserve his family’s home movies made all the hours of preparation for this event worthwhile.

As a small team of just three volunteers, we were ecstatic to get through the day without a single technical difficulty. In preparation for the event, I purchased two Bolex 18-5 projectors off eBay (one for regular 8, one for super-8) which put my old plastic auto-threading projector to shame. I installed fresh motor belts one both of them a few weeks ago and even packed spare bulbs, but they worked flawlessly during the two-hour screening.

Thanks to volunteers Amy Vilelle and John Borman, sponsors Laurisa at Home Movie Depot, Rhonda at Pro8mm, Dwight, Brian, and the rest of the Home Movie team for their support of our first HMD event!