Outreach

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Ever since discovering my grandmother’s home movies in 2004, these small films have been a hobby–maybe even a borderline obsession–that have inspired me to do such bold things as quit a PhD program to go to film school, to start this blog, and stay up until the wee hours trying to snipe old projectors on eBay. Though I was born (alas) in a home video generation, I have devoted much time, energy, and income to preserving my family’s collection of amateur films and hope to inspire many others to do the same.

If you missed the Roanoke Valley’s first Home Movie Day I hosted this November 1st, here’s a recap of some highlights of the day:

One Home Movie Day attendee brought in a film for her co-worker who couldn’t attend the actual event. Earlier that morning, the attendee explained, just the memory of the movie brought the film’s owner to tears. It was, the film’s owner said, a film of a time “when I was young and so full of hope.”

Audience members cracked jokes during the screening’s duller moments, including what felt like an eternity (really only about 2 minutes) of footage devoted to a squirrel sitting in a tree. Several of us were convinced something crazy would happen to justify the long take. No such luck.

With cool prizes including Home Movie Day 2008 buttons, the awesome new HMD tote bag, and free film transfers from Home Movie Depot and Pro 8mm, the HMD Bingo competition was fierce. We had competitors ranging in age from around 7 to 57 years old. At one point, a little girl, the youngest participant, came and sat next to me with her Bingo card in hand while I ran the projectors. She whispered in my ear, “How about you and me work as a team?” Too cute!

After the screening was over, a participant who brought in her 1960s slumber party movie confessed, “My films were so much brighter and colorful than I remembered! I don’t remember them being so beautiful!” She was also the lucky winner of a gift certificate for a free film transfer at Pro8mm, so she’ll be able to see her films again at home.

My favorite comment from the event was caught on video, during some clips of some pretty funny dancing during the above mentioned 1960s slumber party. A ten-year old audience member asked, “You mean people actually recorded these home movies?”

You can check out a clip of the slumber party film (and listen to the background comments!) for yourself…

…
Film drop-off and inspection: 10am to noon
Public screening of home movies, refreshments, and games: 1pm to 3pm
Location: Roanoke Public Library in downtown Roanoke, VA

# of people bringing films for repair/inspection: 4
Number of films screened: 16
Formats screened: 8mm and Super8
Audience: 18+ 3 volunteers

Laughs: too many to count!

Our event was publicized in both print and on the web, including an event listing in The Roanoker magazine, print and web listings in the 40 Days and 40 Nights of Arts and Culture Festival website, and through posters and postcards we distributed in downtown Roanoke and at all seven of the Roanoke Public library branches. We also had a Home Movie Day subpage and Facebook Event Invitation.

I’d like to extend my many thanks to our generous sponsors for supplies, prizes, and support: Roanoke Public Libraries, Home Movie Depot, Pro8mm, and the Center for Home Movies. I also owe a big kudos to Alicia and Nia for volunteering their time to help me with the film repair and inspection–I couldn’t have done it without you!

If you’d like to join us next year, hop on over to our Facebook Fan Page. I’ll keep you posted on upcoming amateur film events!

Home Movie Day is finally coming to Roanoke courtesy of yours truly and the ever-generous main branch of Roanoke Public Library.

The public is invited to bring in their 8mm, Super8, and 16mm home movies on Saturday, November 1st from 10:00am until noon to have them inspected, cleaned, and repaired by professional archivists and trained volunteers. We’ll also have handouts on how to best care for your films and how to have them safely transferred to DVD.

Starting at 1pm, the games begin! We’ll screen a selection of the films brought in whilst playing home movie bingo! Prizes will be awarded and there will be complimentary refreshments for everyone! The event is absolutely FREE and all are welcome with or without home movies in tow!

Home Movie Day Roanoke

@ Roanoke Public Library

706 South Jefferson Street

Downtown Roanoke

10:00-noon Film drop-off and inspection.

1:00-3:00 Free film screening, games, and refreshments!

If you can’t make it in person but would like to show your support, you can become a friend on Facebook.

August 2008 marked the second year of the Blacksburg Stories Youth Video Workshop I cofounded in 2007. This workshop sprung from a love of community filmmaking (first sparked at the FilmFarm in Kotla, Poland, and re-ignited at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia) and the need for constructive summer activities for middle-school youth in Southwest Virginia.

This year’s participants were a diverse bunch hailing from places as far off as Somalia and Liberia and as near as a few miles from the camp headquarters in Blacksburg, Virginia. With the energetic help from Sher Vogel, a graduate student and coordinator of the camp’s day-to-day activities, and the work of three Virginia Tech undergraduate Cinema Studies students, our middle schoolers made amazing documentary videos. Created from scratch over the course of just nine 3-hour days, our 6th through 8th grade students wrote, directed, edited, and shot videos about people, places, and issues they encounter in their own proverbial backyard.

While the product of the workshop (the movies) becomes the public image for the camp, I tend to judge the success of our media literacy training on a child-to-child level. When mothers tell me (as they did this year) that we must increase the age limit so their child can come back next year or that of the dozen or so summer camps their child has attended, Blacksburg Stories is the only one he has ever attended more than once, I know we must doing something right.

If the photos are any proof, the kids had a blast this year! Despite the challenge of having more than one half non-native English speaker participants, the campers bonded with one another, laughed a lot, and build up a wealth of self-confidence when working with computers and other technology.

The title of my favorite video from this year’s worshop was We Feel Good About It!–an interview based and action packed documentary about Blacksburg’s first skate park. I think those same four words sum up my feelings about Blacksburg Stories year two.

My path to filmmaking began in 2004 with the London Documentary Filmmakers’ Workshop in Kotla, Poland. My experiences documenting the life of a small Polish village, and the responsibility I felt preserving a place so beautiful and a way of life so threatened, was strong enough to make me abandon my PhD studies for an ever uncertain career in filmmaking.

Two years later, I found myself in Temple University’s Film and Media Arts Program, and working as video facilitator for Scribe Video Center’s “Precious Places”–a community video project dedicated to documenting the “precious” and often endangered neighborhoods in Philadelphia. As part of this project, I spent most of 2006 working with the Yorktown Community Organization in North Philadelphia. Over 10 months, I taught members of the community, many of them middle-aged or senior citizens, to conceive and shoot a short documentary about their neighborhood, which we edited together throughout the fall semester. Working with Yorktown while a Temple student was especially appropriate in light of the threat Temple University housing poses to the survival of the Yorktown neighborhood.

After a well-attended premiere at Philadelphia’s I-House in February, our video, “Yorktown: You Are Here,” was chosen for a special screening at the Philadelphia Film Festival of select Precious Places projects that were created over the Scribe program’s three year tenure. Though the experience was, at times, daunting and frustrating, I found myself forever connected to a Philadelphia community I would have otherwise called a ghetto; I made friends in an area of the city I would have otherwise never dared to enter. With this small film, I became a part of something much bigger than myself.

Now, another year down the road, my journey has come full-circle: I have returned to the American South, not terribly far from where I grew up, and I am directing a community video project of my own making: Blacksburg Stories Youth Video Workshop. While I never thought I’d voluntarily sign-up to entertain twenty middle schoolers at 9:30 each morning for two weeks, the experience so far has been amazing. In just three days, I’ve seen teens and “‘tweens’” go from making comments like, “Documentaries aren’t movies,” to telling me that my taped interview subject should have been “framed with more headroom.” They are hyper, brutally honest, and, like me, willing to see the stories in the life of their small community.

It’s hard to talk about Blacksburg these days without a mention of the events of April 16, 2007. Though I’ve only been working at Blacksburg’s Lyric Theatre since December of 2006, by that time I had already been warmly welcomed into the community. On that day, my theatre lost three volunteers in the shootings, and my partner lost one of his colleagues. I dare say not a single person who lives, works, or studies in Blacksburg was untouched.

Though I began planning and writing grants for Blacksburg Stories well before April, I believe now, more than ever, in this project’s mission. If we can, as Paul Harrill likes to say, convince children that ‘the world is interesting enough,’ then maybe we can create an audience for films that don’t rely on violence, special effects, or multi-million dollar budgets for their entertainment value. Maybe one day small stories will be enough.