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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.

With Home Movie Day just around the corner (the national celebration is August 18th while Roanoke’s event will take place November 1st), I thought I’d share some stills from a fascinating Super8 film installation I stumbled upon while vacationing in Berlin this summer. I found out about the event, appropriately called 100x Berlin, thanks to large posters in the subway stations around the city with an unmistakable Super8 film projector as the central image.

From June 7 to July 6, 100 vintage Super8 film projectors purred away in the cave-like basement of the Berlin’s KulturBrauerei showcasing glimpses of life in Berlin as seen through lost and found home movies. The projectors and “small films” of Berlin cityscapes and backyards were scavenged from yard sales and eBay by SmallFormat magazine editor, Juergen Lossau.

Lossau and his volunteers were able to keep the film excerpts running non-stop thanks to a wire coat-hanger type loop mechanism he and volunteers attached to each projector. (Click the link for a closer photo of his loop.)

While there was a small entrance fee, I was happy to pay a few Euros for the visual feasts of images. Based on the great condition of many of the projectors in the installation, I’m sure the cost of the installation equipment–not to mention the labor cost for the time and care put into the curation of the films–was near impossible to recoup. Nonetheless, 100xBerlin was an inspiring celebration of the beauty and mystery of home movies, those luminous artifacts of our private histories – histories that each of us carry with us.

Upon returning home, my filmmaking partner Paul Harrill and I set up a more modest home movie celebration of our own as a storefront video kiosk in the window of the Center in the Square in downtown Roanoke. For our installation, we blacked out the windows to the storefront with black kraft paper leaving squares for three iMac computer screens. The computers were programmed to automatically play three speeds and versions of home movies each day from noon to midnight during the month of July. (To learn more about the tech side of the installation, see Paul’s blog post.)

If you’d like to see more images, read a nice recap of the Berlin event with visitors’ comments, or find out how to locate Super8 equipment and resources for your own installation or filmmaking projects, check out the latest edition of SmallFormat. If a subscription would put too much strain on your budget (it’s a steep $79 for 6 issues), then try to get your local library to subscribe for you and all the other cinephiles in your community. That’s what I plan on doing!

At the start of my residency, I attempted to teach the students to make a live-action documentary. I thought they’d quickly pick up the basics of using a tripod, shot composition, and interview techniques. Certainly, the students I worked with were bright, enthusiastic, and eager to make a movie. What I didn’t count on is that English was my students’ second language and even having a discussion about what a documentary is was both a linguistic and conceptual challenge.

Three weeks into the residency, I realized that our documentary (we had started shooting footage and interviewing students in an after school dance class) would not be one we could finish in short, hour-long sessions, even if we had the rest of the school year to do it.Reaching deep into my bag of tricks and somewhat beyond my area of expertise, I found an idea: claymation!

After all, it wasn’t the technology that I really want to teach but instead the storytelling. Taking just a few of the technical aspects out of the picture, I was able to pare down the class to something they could handle. The new class design gave the students fun, easy tasks that could be worked in to one-hour sessions. The basic elements of the class became:

• sculpting clay creatures with modeling clay
• designing and creating a diorama set
• outlining a plot and story idea
• taking still photographs with a camera on a tripod
• giving voice to their characters using voiceover
• creating a soundscape using the BBC’s sound effects library
• adding titles and effects to the footage (after I imported and cleaned up some of the stills).

Soon after switching to clay, I noticed a big changes in the classroom. My students’ vocabulary was growing by leaps and bounds, even the most timid of students was bubbling over with ideas during group discussions about plot and dialogue, and I found myself not wanting to miss a week’s class, not even for vacation.

What stunned me the most was learning they missed me too: I came back from an conference trip to three hand-drawn “thank you” cards from my students. My next week back in class, I was greeted with, “Miss Ashley, I miss you so much! It’s been forever since we have class!”

Our final class was bittersweet. I gave each student a new, unopened back of clay, a book about drawing animals, and a DVD of their finished film. Together we watched our finished work on the school’s biggest television and I smiled and nodded as they told me about their next big movie.

If you’re a filmmaker looking to learn to create (or how to teach) claymation or simple stop-motion animation, you’ll definitely want to check out this site.

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…

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!

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.