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- That's wild.

- Oh boy.

- That's beautiful

- [Instructor] Okay, place a card.

- Yeah!

- Thank you for joining us tonight for After Dark Home Movies. My name is Kathleen Maguire and I'm part of the team that puts on the After Dark programs. While this program has been recorded remotely from all over the place, the home of After Dark, the Exploratorium, is located on the traditional lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone People. We pay our respects to elders both past and present for their care taking and shepherding of the land. For tonight's After Dark we're digging into home movies. At the Exploratorium, in our gallery one space, we examine human phenomena. Looking at the ways humans think, feel, and interact through scientific investigation and creative exploration. Also since 1982, the Exploratorium has had an ongoing program, Cinema Arts, which uses film as another pathway for examining some of the major learning areas that weave throughout our museum floor. As a genre of film, home movies have a unique and intimate power to offer insights into lived experiences. In watching home movies we're offered a window into other people's lives. Whether those of our own family members or complete strangers. As you'll hear throughout tonight's program, that intimate lens can offer a connection and highlight shared aspects of our human experience. As amateur productions, home movies also allow the creator to document their own story in the way they choose. When home movies are looked at as historical documents there's something of a pure history, delivered without external influence, or frameworks on the narrative. Important to note, tonight's program hones in on home movies made on celluloid. However, home movies have been made on many moving image technologies, proliferating exponentially as each new and more affordable technology emerges. And there'll be one exception at the end of the program which is a home movie that's truly fantastic, made on video. Tonight you'll see home movies made accessible through digitization projects at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC. And San Francisco based Center for Asian American Media. You'll see how artists have repurposed home movies for new works, and you'll learn quite a bit about the format Super 8. And we'll be starting things off by digging a little bit more into the technology used to create home movies on celluloid. In case you have some practical questions about your own home movies, throughout tonight's program we'll have a few visits from the home movie helper, Antonella Bonfanti. Antonella is the film collection supervisor at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She's a graduate of the Selznick School of Film Preservation. And she's the former executive director of San Francisco based Canyon Cinema. In her first helpful segment she'll be sharing how to care for your home movies. Right after that, we'll hear from Danny Plotnick about Super 8 millimeter film. Danny Plotnick is an underground filmmaker who's films straddle the line between high brow and low brow art. Fiercely independent, he's best known for working in Super 8 and producing cult films and videos with a punk rock attitude and subterranean snarl. He's the author of "Super 8 an Illustrated History." And he's also the director of film studies and an associate professor at the University of San Francisco.

- Good evening, and welcome to Home Movie Helper. I'm you're host, Antonella Bonfanti and I will be guiding you through some essential tricks and tips to becoming a good custodian of home movies. Whether your collection includes your own family films or thrift shop finds, the content of those films are unique and irreplaceable documents of our collective histories. Today, I'll be focusing on film but keep in mind that home movies can be found on a variety of media including video tape, and digital files. Think about it. You probably shot a home movie on your smart phone earlier today, right? So throughout this event I'll cover four major topics. Storage and care, identification and decay, digitization and documentation, and finally projection. Let's get started. So, how to care for your home movies. I once read in a late edition of the Kodak book of film care that film is like skin. It can be scratched, blistered by chemicals or heat, damaged by prolonged exposure to sun or to light, or get moldy in extreme heat or humid environments. This is a wonderful analogy of how to think about or what to think about when you are faced with a box of home movies. Where should you store these precious reels of celluloid and what should you do with them? Let's start with where to store your films. A cool dry place is ideal. Never on the floor, never in the attic or basement. The top shelf of a closet which doesn't share any exterior walls is really the best place. If you can, keep the films in their original protective cans and reels. But if those reels and cans are in anyway compromised by mold or bugs or mites, you should recan them. In either case, you should consider upgrading to probably, poly, excuse me, polypropylene inert archival cans if possible. Keep your collection together if you can, all in one place, in a banker box, for example. And one that's ideally acid free. As a next step you should look inside the cans and boxes to see if the films are unraveling or otherwise improperly stored. Remove any plastic bags, tape down the ends with some acid free artists tape if you have it, like this. And remember that to store films flat. F is for flat and for film.

- Well, Kathleen, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here and part of this program to talk about home movies. And so as we all know when we make home movies today we're likely doing that on our phones. Phones however, as we all know, are a relatively new tool for such an endeavor. My son, who is now a sophomore in college, the home movies we made of him in the early 2000s were shot on MiniDV tapes. And home movies have been shot on a variety of tape formats, VHS, Hi-8, MiniDV, since the early '80s. But tonight what I've been tasked with establishing is the world of home movies from a pre-digital, pre-tape era. So how were home movies made when people were shooting film? Some of you may be familiar with the 16 millimeter Regular 8 and Super 8 millimeter film mediums but some of you may not. So let's talk about them and how they relate to the home movie world. I should mention that when we reference millimeters in film we're actually referencing the width of the film gauge. So this is some 16 millimeter film and it's 16 millimeters wide. Regular 8 or Super 8, we'll talk about the differences of those, are eight millimeters wide. So they're simply smaller formats in terms of image area and image dimension. And the larger the image area of the format, the more definition that film format had. And relatively speaking, the more expensive it was for consumers. 16 millimeter was developed in 1923 and its uses were many and transformed over time. But for the sake of our discussion today in the 1920s, 16 millimeter was the main home movie format of choice in America. Regular eight millimeter was developed in 1932. Sometimes you'll hear regular eight referred to as standard eight or simply eight millimeter. And it quickly supplanted 16 to become the home movie medium of choice from its advent in the early '30s all the way through the mid 1960s. Regular 8 was a cheaper format to use compared to 16 and therefore preferable for home movie use. For moms and dads trying to economize while documenting all the family fun. But like 16 millimeter, making film in eight millimeter was still a complex endeavor. Both 16 and Regular 8 involved having to manually thread film into camera before you could shoot. I teach at the University of San Francisco. I still teach analog film classes and when I teach my 16 millimeter class now students get freaked out when they have to thread their first roll of film. It's a nerve racking experience. And in actuality, Regular 8 was more complicated to thread than 16. So I've got a little Regular 8 camera right here and you open it up and you would get, you know you'd have a reel of film and you'd have to thread this film into this camera. So right off the bat it's difficult. The interesting thing about Regular 8, it too came in rolls that were actually 16 millimeters wide. And the way that it worked is, you would thread this roll of film into your camera but the camera's film gate, the place where the film got exposed to film was only eight millimeters wide. So when you shot you'd only expose half of the film. Well, with eight millimeter, when you got to the end of your roll you would have to pull the roll back out of the camera, flip it over, wind it back into the camera and now you would then shoot the roll a second time and this time you would expose the other half of the film. The other eight millimeters of film that didn't get exposed the first time through. So it was a really complex process. For each roll of film you had to thread the film twice. And then what would happen is you would send it to the lab, the lab would, it would be called slit the film. They would actually slice the film in half, tape it together and you would now get a 50 foot roll of film that was eight millimeters wide in about three and a half minutes. But at the end of the day it was a difficult process. And then along came Super 8 millimeter which was developed by Kodak in 1965. And upon its arrival Super 8 quickly supplanted Regular 8 as the home movie medium of choice. And here is an image of the Kodak M2. This was the first Super 8 camera developed by Kodak. It cost 49 dollars and you were now ready to roll shooting Super 8 film. But so what's the deal with Super 8 versus Regular 8? Super 8 and Regular 8 were both eight millimeters wide. But Super 8 was designed to have smaller sprockets than Regular 8. And what that meant was that an image in a Super 8 film would cover more of that eight millimeter film strip than Regular 8. So almost 50% more information was contained in the Super 8 image compared to Regular 8. And again, more info meant an image with more definition. And Super 8 took over the home movie market. Not only did it have a better image than Regular 8 but it was so much easier to use. There was another big advancement with Super 8 and that was this light type cartridge that the film came in. You had 50 feet of film spooled into this cartridge and you no longer had to thread your film. You would open the film chamber, you would pop the roll in, and you were ready to go. This was so much easier than Regular 8 and 16. And I think the big idea here was now that anybody could make film. You made the mechanics of the process so much easier. Kodak was aiming for a 20 second reload capability. And that was a big deal, because again, threading cameras was complex, it was stressful and therefore an undertaking for the mechanically inclined. This easy to use plug and play system would now allow anyone without any kind of mechanical training to jump in and start making films. If you think about the explosion in media making, video making, and photo taking that was brought on by the simplicity and ubiquity of smart phones, that was the promise that Super 8 had. And so Super 8 hit the market in August of '65 and took off in a really big way. Within two years there were 30 different companies making Super 8 cameras. Both Kodak and Bell and Howell who were the first two companies in the pool, were actually really surprised at how quickly Super 8 took off. Regular 8 sales were decimated. Kodak went as far to discontinue all but one of its Regular 8 cameras by 1966. Just one year after its introduction. And Super 8 then became the home movie medium, Super 8 became the home movie medium of choice through the early '80s. And it's hard to get specific numbers but at the end of the day over, easily over 11 million Super 8 cameras were sold. And hundreds of millions of rolls of film were shot. When Super 8 was a booming business the average home movie user was shooting maybe three to four rolls of film per year. And that makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a home movie perspective. What events do you wanna capture on film? Birthdays, family vacation, Christmas. Right, that comes out to, depending the size of your family, three or four rolls of film. As a little side note, interestingly the primary reason for the development of Super 8 was not for home movie use. Kodak thought that this format was gonna really be a boom for educational, industrial, and commercial films. That never really happened. The big splash that happened was in the home movie market. And the other two interesting developments that I would consider home movie adjacent was one, or the first one, due to its ease of use kids and teens started borrowing the family cameras to make backyard monster movies. And the type of action and adventure movies they were seeing in theaters. Sam Raimi is the classic example of this. Before the Spider-Man movies, before the Evil Dead movies, him and his buddies, his future star Bruce Campbell, they were in suburban Detroit making horror films with their Super 8 cameras. Norwood Cheek who started the Zeen and the screening series, Flicker in the '90s. An important person in sort of the underground film movement then. Talked about his early, sort of revelatory moment coming of age in the 1970s. He says, I went to a family reunion when I was 15. My cousin herded all of the family into the basement and he said I'm gonna show you the movie I made with my best friend. He turned out the lights, bed sheet on the wall, turned on a Super 8 projector and he had a record that was playing the "Rocky" theme. He and his friends did their own Super 8 remake of "Rocky" that was like 12 minutes. It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. They did all the classic, you know, trying to pretend they were boxers. One of the guys drank raw eggs which is something that happens in "Rocky." And as I was watching it I was like, that's what I wanna do. And I asked for a Super 8 camera for Christmas, right? And so that is, you know, that kind of home movie adjacent use actually kind of launched a lot of independent filmmakers in the '70s and '80s. The other home movie adjacent phenomena where Super 8 really took off was in the making of Super 8 prints for Hollywood movies for home use. So before VCRs you could order prints of Hollywood movies and TV shows and sporting events on Super 8. And you could watch them on your home, handy-dandy Super 8 projector. Most of those films were released in digest form which means you were buying an edited version of the film, running roughly three minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes. And what made it an even stranger experience is that many of the films were released in black and white as opposed to color. And silently featuring newly minted title cards instead of with sound. And one of my prized possessions, I have a 10 minute black and white silent version of "Planet of the Apes." But right before VCRs this is how people could watch movies over and over and study movies. There were also reduction prints and that's what these were called. They were being reduced from 35 to Super 8 millimeter. There were also reduction prints that included sound and even feature length films delivered on Super 8. So if you were on top of your game you could be projecting feature length versions of "Jaws," "Saturday Night Fever," "Straw Dogs" in your home theater. All kinds of films were made in these reduction prints. From 1965 until 1973 any Super 8 film, home movie or otherwise would be shot silently. Which is in keeping with what was going on with Regular 8 and even 16 millimeter home movie setups. And I have to show one of my home movies circa 1966. Here it is. All right. In the early '70s Super 8 begins to move beyond this type of home movie and teen exploration of mimicking stuff that the kids liked. Artists and professionals were beginning to recognize the possibility of what this low cost movie medium offered. Maybe it could be an alternative to 16 which was a much more expensive and complex format. And the development that really transformed what could be done with Super 8 was the advent of sound. In 1973 Kodak developed sound cameras in conjunction with sound film stocks. The sound film stocks had a magnetic stripe running alongside the film. And I don't know if you'll be able to see it here. But you can see this brown stripe that runs along the edge of the film. That is a magnetic stripe. The same type of magnetic tape that was used in audio cassettes. And their new sound cameras came equipped with a mic input, a headphone jack, a sound recording head. Some cameras had level controls as well. And now you could plug a mic directly into a camera, press the camera's trigger and you would be recording sync sound dialogue right unto your film. This, what's called single system sound production methodology, was a unique Super 8 practice. And really separated it from both Regular 8 and 16, neither of which could record sound in that simple manner, say for a couple rare exceptions. Kodak's early foray into sound produced one of their most chilling ad campaigns and also a terrorizing call to make home movies. Right, you can see that in this ad here. And it also produced one of my favorite suggestive camera designs, which, you know, you can see right here. But sound Super 8 revolutionized the medium and artists ran with it. You can now shoot documentaries with talking heads. You can shoot narratives with dialogue and certainly you can record sound home movies as well. And those were made all the time. Now I recognize that I'm inching towards talking about more professional and artistic practices that utilize what is initially this home movie medium. But I wanted to leave you with a couple other ways to think about home movies or expand our notion of what constitutes a home movie. Artists made films about the places they lived, portraits of people they knew, and if they were making narrative films, those films were often set in their apartments. Featured music they were listening to or perhaps even made. Art directed with the clothing, the furniture, and the nick nacks that they owned. Seminal independent and LGBTQ filmmaker Derek Jarman who made "Blue," "The Last of England," "Jubilee," "Sebastiane" he shot over 70 Super 8 films while he was making his well known features. And he has a short film from the early '70s called "Studio Bankside" which I'll often show my classes. And this is a diary film. It's a portraiture of a place, of his studio, of the artists he's involved with. And this was an important type of documentation. Hollywood, big budget films were not making movies set in the art world, the LGBTQ world, the punk world of 1970s London. But Derek Jarman was, right? And that's the role of artists. To document was is not being documented. To give us a glimpse into a world not often recognized right at that big Hollywood level. And perhaps, inadvertently, these type of films also serve as a historical time capsule. And right, that's what home movies are as well, right? They give us glimpse into a particular moment in time. And so those films weren't necessarily made as home movies but they functioned in a similar fashion as we look back in this sort of media archeology type of way. There was also a push for Super 8 to take over the news gatherings fare. It was cheaper than 16 and it had a smaller footprint. And in this realm Super 8 was embraced for its portability. The cameras were really small, right? This is a Super 8 camera, compared to a much bigger 16 camera. Les Levine was a filmmaker and he documented The Troubles in Ireland in 1972. And speaking to that experience he says, everybody should be making their own news program. Take your Super 8 camera and go out and make a news program. And one of the facets that Levine loved about Super 8 for reporting from the trenches was its mobility. And he says, with Super 8 we were able to get especially difficult shots. I would just tell the camera woman, Catherine Kenai, to run over to a certain place and see what was happening. We would point the camera and zap, we got it. Now we all talk about the citizen filmmaker and how we can document all sorts of protest movements to the prevalence of phones that record home video. Well, that's what Levine was talking about back in 1972. And in a way, this type of documentation is also kind of a home movie. Or could be seen with that lens. It's not opening Christmas gifts, but it's documenting the march or the protests that you attend and are part of. And it's documenting what's important to us as citizens, right. We aren't leaving it to the professionals to tell us what's important. We're making that determination ourselves. And there's all sorts of, you know, underground artists and Super 8 filmmakers working in this vein. Be it Dave Markey documenting the hardcore music scene of the early '80s in LA. Be it Beth Bee documenting the crumbling New York City infrastructure in the 1970s. Be it Narcisa Hirsch documenting the happenings in Argentina in the 1960s, right? Again, these are all artists documenting their lives and inadvertently creating a time capsule in the same way that home movies serve as a look back at a moment in time.

- Up next, our home movie helper returns to share a little bit more about the characteristics of celluloid as well as dig into the ways that film can be damaged or deteriorate over time. Then we'll hear from Stephen Gong and Patricia Villon from the Center for Asian American Media about their project, Memories to Light. We'll also watch a film from Memories to Light. Stephen Gong is the executive director of the Center for Asian American Media. Stephen has been associated with CAAM since its founding in 1980 and has been executive director since 2006. He has been a lecturer in the Asian American Studies program at UC Berkeley, where he developed and taught a course on the history of Asian American media. Patricia Villon is a moving image archivist and MLIS student focusing on media archival studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She is a member of the Blackhole Collective Film Lab which is based out of Oakland and a co-programmer for Light Field, an international exhibition of recent and historic experimental moving image art on celluloid held annually in San Francisco. She is the archivist for the Memories to Light project. And before Stephen and Patricia introduce the film they'll share in the project we'll watch a short trailer from the Memories to Light project that gives you an understanding of some of the work they do.

- Welcome back to Home Movie Helper. In this section we'll learn about some of the basic physical characteristics of film and how to understand if it's overall condition is stable or if it starting to show signs of early or advanced deterioration. Motion picture film comes in many sizes. This is what's known as gauge. The most common gauges you will come across for North American home movies are 16 millimeter, eight millimeter, and Super 8. Though it is entirely possible to find home movies on 35 millimeter or other less common gauges like 9.5 millimeter or 28 millimeter. Let me share a quick history lesson with you. Though other gauges were developed in the early days of cinema, 35 millimeter quickly was established as the industry standard. It was a professional medium and too expensive to shoot, project, or process for the average person. Another reason we don't see many examples of early home movies on 35 millimeter is because motion picture stock was manufactured using a highly flammable nitrate cellulose base. The projection and handling of the nitrate was a highly skilled trade. Nitrate fires could not be extinguished because the combustion process generates its own oxygen and the fumes that off gas of these terrible fires were lethal. So sometimes even if you would escape the fire but days later would die a mysterious death which was of course, then linked back to this terrible nitrate fire. Anyhow, film manufacturing companies like Kodak in the United States and Pathe in France understood that if they were to sell film and filmmaking to the home and amateur market that it had to be safe to use in homes and other nonprofessional projection environments. A nonflammable base would need to be developed and so safety, or slow burning stocks were developed towards the beginning of the 1900s. And by the early 1920s home movie systems with cameras, film stock and projectors were being marketed and sold to the general public. In the United States, 16 millimeter became the predominant format. And so how do you identify what you have? Well, you're gonna wanna look for markings on the box to see if there are any indications of whether or not what's inside is 16, eight, Super 8. That is definitely not conclusive, but it's a good place to start. You then wanna look at the films and then, you know, if you've got a good eye for measuring things you might right away discover that something is 16 or eight, or Super 8. And you also wanna kind of look at the position of the perforations. Something that might be unusual in your collection would be something that's 9.5 where the perforation would actually appear in the center of the frame. Sorry, not the center of the frame, but the center of the frame line. Very strange. Anyhow, films can be color or black and white. They're mostly silent but some do have sound. Usually they present themselves as these delicate magnetic sound, magnetic stripes on the edge of the film. And some optical tracks do exist too. There were some pretty advanced optical track systems for 16 millimeter that were marketed to the home movie audience. So, what are the types of damage that you should be keeping an eye out for? Well, one of the most common damage you'll see is scratches will generally present themselves as these vertical lines up and down the film. You'll also wanna keep an eye out for torn perforations or broken and poorly made splices. These, both the torn perfs and bad splices can definitely affect playback of the film. So whether you're projecting or the film is gonna be put through a scanner, these would need to be repairs by a professional. Or an amateur who really knows what they're doing. And then finally, you're gonna wanna also keep an eye out for, an eye or a nose, out for decay. The most common sign of decay is the smell of vinegar. Now you don't need to take, stick your nose right on the film and take a huge deep whiff. You just wanna sort of, you'll sense the aroma of vinegar the second you open the box. The vinegar sign means that the film base itself is deteriorating and losing its malleable properties. It'll start to shrink and twist and warp and all of this can affect the playback of the film. Also, once film starts to, once film has vinegar syndrome it can not be reversed. The other two types of decay you wanna keep an eye out for are mold or bugs. And these generally, you know, bug mites kind of create little nests on the edges of your film and mold you'll be able to identify by there being little puffy, fluffy, fuzzy growths on the edge of your film. If you have any films that are decaying, those are films again, that have mold, bugs, are suffering from vinegar syndrome. You wanna remove those and isolate them from the rest of your collection. Because they can then infect the rest of your films. So please, keep those aside.

- Thank you Stephen and Patricia for joining us and coming here to chat a little bit about the Memories to Light project. But could we start by learning a little bit more about the Center for Asian American Media? Stephen, maybe you'll take this one.

- Great, thank you. Hey, it's a wonderful privilege to be part of this, Kathleen. Thank you so much for inviting us. The Center for Asian American Media was founded in 1980 in San Francisco. We are a nonprofit organization that supports filmmakers who tell stories by and about Asian Americans and the Asian American experience to the broadest audience as possible. And the Memories to Light project came out in a wonderful way to expand even our definition of storytelling.

- So could you tell us a little bit more about that both about what the Memories to Light project is and the ways that incorporating home movies into the CAAM mission can expand storytelling?

- Yeah, I'll tackle that one. So, since CAAM's broader mission is to kind of support the idea of the Asian American story and the narrative. Within this whole idea of media making is this concepts to preserve home movies. So Memories to Light kind of arose from this need to preserve these stories that were recorded on 16 millimeter, 8 millimeter and Super 8 film. And these are all stories that, you know, were recorded way back perhaps in the 1950s and '60s. And a lot of these formats, as we know, like a lot of families don't typically have the equipment to access these mediums. You'll need like a projector, a way to digitize film which is usually very expensive and not accessible to many. And then through the project Memories to Light we give families access to their collections once again so they're able to share these stories with the next generation in their own families. So I guess, like with home movies, is they're usually recorded by everyday people. These were ways for families to just remember maybe, grandma's birthday, a sibling's third birthday, or maybe a wedding. And I think with home movies is just a way to see like everyday lived experiences like that's not, in a non-commercial format. These were just stories that people were living. And I think within the wider media industry we tend to focus more so on these ideas of pre-made narratives. But within home movies it's just a way to glance into the lives that people lived. And you know, just everyday lived experiences. Like, we may think home movies portray this sort of mundane experience but these were, I think, ways to see how a lot of people lived their own lives and stories that were important to them.

- And?

- Yeah, and I'll just add, thank you, that was beautiful. And I will just add, because I was around at the time, when CAAM was founded, very definitely the conversations about why we want to start the organization was to address the absence of authentic images about the Asian American experience. And the fact is that our only media images were all from Hollywood. And of course, they constrained the Asian American experience to being, you know, within China Town or within a few carefully prescribed roles. You know, as a laundry man or as, that kind of thing, or as a gangster, or a dragon lady and what not. And it is so revelatory to see the process of living in this country and how those first generations expressed their cultural histories. You know, and their ways of encountering kind of this new identity.

- And could you tell us a little bit about the film you've chosen to share, which I think is about a really important figure in the San Francisco Asian American community.

- Yes, thank you very much, Kathleen. Yeah, I'd love to share this film. It came about as one of the byproducts we always envisioned for this project was that some of the families, asking a family member to help talk about what we were seeing. We could make a short film and then share it and all its content. And we asked at the time, a professor at San Francisco State named Dr. Dawn Mabalon. And she had donated the family home movies to us and as it turns out she is a, was, because she tragically passed away just a couple of years ago. But she was in some ways the official historian of the Filipino-American community and comes from a very important family. Which she talks about in her film. So, I hope you enjoy it. And it's a wonderful reminder of what Stockton, California was at one time. Stockton, California was the largest community of Filipino-Americans in the country and that was milieu in which the Bohulano Family grew up. And it is such a rich story and it is bitter sweet but we are glad that we even have Dawn's voice and her remembering of what her childhood was like. Because that's all we have from her now.

- Well, thank you both so much. And now we'll all watch together.

- My grandmother has her three grandchildren around her. I mean there would eventually be seven. But it's myself, my cousin Jared, my cousin Ariana. I think it's her birthday, she must have been two. And she kisses all of us. It was just this really sweet exchange and she's in, I think she's in her 50s at this point. We're in my house on Jefferson Street, my parent's house. And it's this really sweet moment of my grandmother being very affectionate with us and she was a really tough woman. You know she, very strict, had high expectations of us and very funny and loving. Stockton was the home to the largest community of Filipinos outside of the Philippines through much of the 20th century. It's one of the reasons why my grandfathers chose to settle in Stockton when they came in 1929. And on my mother's side my grandfather went to the Philippines and fought in World War II in the 1st Philippine Infantry Regiment. Married my grandmother, Conception Mareno. Then brought her over and it was Stockton that they all chose to settle in. It was where their other relatives were. It was where Little Manila was, which was this big, ethnic neighborhood in downtown Stockton. You know, so it was this very warm and close knit community. Where we lived in Stockton was on the south side of Stockton and the south side was the side where all the people of color lived. It was a very, very segregated city. And that was something I didn't really realize until I was six years old and was bused in the school desegregation busing program to the other side and I realized, oh this is where all the white people are. And this is where all the nice houses are. And the malls and the shopping areas. When we were younger we were excluded from so much of white Stockton. And so much of middle class and upper middle class Stockton. We really created our own world in the south side and in downtown Stockton and in Little Manila. By the time I was born Little Manila had been destroyed. But it's this incredible community that they create. This community of family who may have been distant in the Philippines but are close as brother and sister here in the United States. You really have to start over in America and create a new family and the people who may not have been so close to you. Third, fourth, fifth cousins. Somebody who lived down the block in the Philippines are suddenly as close as your blood. We all grew up, generally, the same side of town. But my family, we all lived within a one mile radius of each other. It was this community where you really couldn't get into much trouble because everybody was watching you. You know, so you walked down the block and hey, where are you going? You know, or oh I saw so, you know, I saw you trying to go to McDonald's and get ice cream and you're not supposed to leave the house. You see this flourishing of the Filipino American community after it had gone through so much hardship. From the 19 teens, up 'til after World War II. And I'm not necessarily gonna say it was a golden age. I mean, Filipinos are still segregated to the south side of Stockton. The high schools and the public schools I went to were still some of the worst funded schools in the city. And you could feel a lot of hope and a lot of promise. The fact that they could now become citizens. They could buy land. They could find jobs. And they couldn't do any of those things before World War II. Many Filipinos thought that they would work in the fields and then finish college later, you know. Or work in the fields in the summer times and then finish college. But the depression really dashed all those dreams and for my father's father, Pablo Mabalon, he worked in the fields but he had restaurant experience. And so he opened up a restaurant in Little Manila. That became an institution for Filipino farm workers and people coming through Stockton and living in Stockton. His restaurant served as a post office and a bank and a community center. He had it until 1983. It was the longest Filipino restaurants probably in the nation. And so when Filipinos were going on strike in the '20s and the '30s my grandfather fed them for free. Carlos Bulosan went to eat at my grandfather's restaurant and he ate for free all the time because he never had any money. He was an organizer. He was a writer. You know, he was an activist and my grandfather had a very kindly heart. He never would turn anyone away. My mother's father, Delfin Bohulano, he worked in the fields when he first came in 1929. He worked as a boilermaker in Mare Island. He was an aspiring boxer. He fought in World War II. Both he and my grandmother went to college on the GI bill. They had their college educations. My grandfather in business administration. My grandmother in education. My grandmother as a war bride came to America in 1952. They didn't realize how bad racism would still affect their careers and their life choices. So, my grandfather was a farm labor contractor until the end of his life. My grandmother eventually became one of the first Filipina teachers in the San Joaquin delta area. When my father came in the 1963, he came with a college education. He came with a medical degree but Filipinos were not given opportunities to work in the medical field. That didn't come for another five to 10 years that you had massive immigration of more nurses and doctors and medical professionals. And so my father worked in the fields. That was really the only place that Filipinos could find work. One of his friends who was part of his fraternity was Larry Itliong who started the Delano Grape Strike. And so they all knew each other and Stockton was really this hub for farm labor activism and farm labor activists. And all those unions really have their roots in Stockton. They were my uncles and my family's cousins. And you know, it was really, this work in the fields was really seen as very dignified work. It was a tragedy that those who were, who had educations could not move beyond the fields. But that was why they put that hope on our generation. I feel that growing up in Stockton, I didn't ask enough questions. That's one of the reasons why I decided to research and teach Filipino American history and then write the book about Stockton. I looked through the films and seeing all the people who, you know, and all the different celebrations. Whether it was my grandfather's 50th birthday which was the earliest home movie that we have. That gathering at my grandparents house in 1958, they had just bought that house three years prior. And seeing them surrounded with so much love and all of their cousins and town mates and friends that they had made in northern California, all coming together. Seeing my mom as an 11 year old girl doing the jitterbug with her older brother. And all of that hope really for their life in America. Imagining what they had hoped for us by leaving and settling in Stockton and trying to make a life for themselves. And working so hard. I just really, I really feel blessed.

- [Family Member] Say a few words, Dawn. You're gonna be in the movie. In the movie, just a take. Say, best wishes for your baby, Auntie Wendy. Say best wishes.

- Wishes.

- Say hello, everybody.

- [Family] Say hello.

- Thank you again to Stephen and Patricia as well as the Center for Asian American Media for sharing more about Memories to Light. You can watch many more films from the Memories to Light project through Archive.org. Up next, our home movie helper will offer some tips for digitizing and documenting your own home movies. And then we'll hear from Courtney Stephens and K.J. Relth-Miller and watch their film, "Mating Games." Courtney Stephens is a nonfiction and experimental filmmaker. She teaches at The New School in New York City. K.J. Relth-Miller is a film programmer with the UCLA film and television archive and an adjunct professor in the film and video program at Cal Arts.

- Hello and welcome back to Home Movie Helper. In this section we're gonna cover digitizing and documenting your home movies and at the end I'll give you a, point you towards a few wonderful resources that you can explore on your own time. Digitizing your films is not only a great way to view your films safely and as many times as you wish but it is also a way for you to participate in the preservation of these important historical documents. There are many wonderful and reputable vendors out there. If your local to the San Francisco bay area, my personal endorsement is to have your films transferred at Movette Film Transfer on Valencia Street. And for those of you in southern California, you should consider Pro8. The Center for Home Movies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the preservation, appreciation, and discovery of home movies is generally a wonderful resource as well. And it includes a map with links to transfer houses across the United States. You can find them at CenterForHomeMovies.org. Before you get started searching for a vendor, you should ask yourself how do wanna share and view your films? Do you wanna watch them on DVD? Do you wanna share them on the internet via an online streaming platform with your families and friends? Do you just wanna watch them locally on your computer? And what can you afford and manage? And then you wanna, and with that, excuse me, with that information in mind you then have to ask a certain amount of questions to your vendor to make sure that you have found the right match. Here are a couple of really standard questions that you should be asking. Number one, will you return my originals? And I assure you here, the only correct answer is yes. And when you get them back, don't throw them away. You never know when you may need to re-scan them again. Technology may improve over time and you may wanna get better transfers. Think about all of those folks who transferred their films to VHS and now are wondering, hmm, would be great to have them on HD. Anyhow, you also may, you also don't want to throw them away because they could be of interest to a local film archive, or historical society who is collecting this type of materials. The other question you would wanna ask your vendor is, will you retain copies of my files? Now this is important because you know, these are your family films and you would wanna wonder, it's like, well why are you? If they say yes, you'd say, well why are you retaining copies of my files? Are you using it just to like, as samples of your work. Or are you selling them? Important questions. Well, now that you've got your films transferred you will want to keep those safe as well. Make copies and store them in different places. Remember the three, two, one rule. Let's say for example you would want to keep a set on your desktop computer, another set on the cloud, another set on an external hard drive. You may even wanna send a copy of that hard drive to your relatives somewhere else in the country. So that if something were to happen in your home they would be recoverable elsewhere. Think about what you can afford. Can you afford and manage perpetual cloud storage or is another option more ideal for you and your family? And when you're talking to your vendor, ask them about how much storage digitizing your films would need. And then make your decisions on how much of your collection to digitize accordingly. And something else to think about when thinking about how to digitize your films and if you need to prioritize certain ones over others. You may wanna think about, you know, are the films in my collection starting to decay? In which case, the ones that are starting to decay you would want to do first. Documenting and having an inventory of your home movies is a really useful way for future generations to have a handle on what it is that you are passing unto them. And it's a good, if you are able to, write it out electronically and print it out and place a copy of that document in with your films. This will help, oh I'm sorry, let me back up for a second. A very important thing. If any of your relatives are alive and are able to tell you about these events, interview them and keep a copy of that with your films as well. This as well can also help you prioritize what you would like to digitize first. Is aunt Alice's 90th birthday coming up? Maybe she would like to see what she was up to in 1947 and I'm sure your cousins would too. And so for more resources and information, as I mentioned before, please consider visiting the CenterForHomeMovies.org website. The your movies sections to find out more about how to care for your films, transfer issues, transfer houses in your region and plenty else more.

- Thank you, Courtney and K.J. for joining us and letting us include "Mating Games" in this program. So to start us off I think you created this film for a very specific purpose. So could you tell us about why you made it and what it was first intended to be used for?

- Sure, so K.J. and I also have lives as, K.J. more professionally as a programmer. And so we had put together a four night series in Los Angeles at a marionette theater. Bob Baker Marionette Theater. This was two years ago?

- It was in 2017. It was in the spring of 2017.

- So three years ago. And the program was kind of an exploration of Los Angeles through kind of unusual audio visual documents. It included feature films, advertorial films, live performance, dance, and puppet shows. So this film was created for a night whose theme was LA as Eden. And so it was looking at kind of Los Angeles as a kind of earthly paradise and some of the documents that might kind of reinforce or challenge that idea.

- Yeah, and when we, we stumbled across the footage in the, on Archive.org. And it was just raw scans of footage, silent footage. All from this one collection at USC and we wanted to be able to show the film but knew that if, you know, we wanted to add something more than just running it silent. And we also decided, I don't know, it kind of became more of a film project when we decided to conform it. I think it was three different distinct reels that we conformed into the piece that you see. And yeah, we wanted to add an audio element and this music, I don't even know how the idea of the music came about. But we tried it with the footage and it just worked really well.

- Yeah, the soundtrack that the audience will be hearing soon is really amazing and creates a completely different quality and tone to what you're seeing than you probably see in the just straight forward footage. I think, so the footage too is recorded mainly by one person, Russel M. Saunders. Who has a pretty interesting story, I think. Could you tell us a little bit about what you know about him and why this collection exists?

- Sure, maybe K.J. can speak to the collection because I don't know as much about how it ended up with USC and the Hugh Hefner Foundation, or Foundation.

- The archive, yeah. The Hugh Hefner Archive.

- But Russel M. Saunders he was a, so he was a gymnast and an acrobat and was really dedicated to the work of kind of public education about health and acrobatics. And so he setup shop, so now Muscle Beach kind of exists as this sort of tourist gym in Venice Beach. At this time that this was recorded I believe it was few miles north more in southern Santa Monica. But he was kind of a fixture there and he shot film. But in his life outside of that he worked as a Hollywood body double, stunt double. I think he did, he was a body double for Gene Kelly in "Singing in the Rain." He for, Alan Ladd in "Shane" I just reviewed some of his specs. He also modeled for Salvador Dali in a painting of a, you know, a kind of man with the perfect physique. So he was a, yeah, a proliferator of good health of California. And so he shot--

- Yeah, he saw Muscle Beach as sorta, as an opportunity for free health education, basically. And I'm actually not sure how the collection ended up at USC. So I can't really speak to that. But you know, I do know that this was part of his, he recorded this seemingly for posterity. These are considered home movies. They're amateur films. I don't think that he was shooting them for anyone but himself and for the posterity of the city, really.

- And you pointed out these are amateur films and home movies. And it seems that K.J. in your work as a programmer and Courtney in your work as both an artist and curator you're often digging into archives and looking towards sort of amateur made historic media. So I'm wondering if, K.J., you could talk from a programming perspective and Courtney, you from an artist perspective of how historic media can help inform the way we view our sort of contemporary landscape. And how these things aren't necessarily trapped in history but have lasting value.

- Courtney, you wanna take this--

- You want me to take this one? Um, yeah. I think, I've worked a lot with archival materials and I think, well in the words of Bert Hellinger who I believe is also part of this program. They're very hygienic. They are also, I think working with the past doesn't just reveal what happened in the past. It also reveals elements of how, what can I say? I mean I think it can do a lot of things but how history, what is encoded in terms of who writes the perspective of history and then what perspectives are outside of that gaze. And so those are subjects that I've pursued in my own work. I guess, working with found footage on especially feminist histories that are kind of, you know, embedded in the archive or absent from the archive. And how to kind of call attention to that. But I think home movies are wonderful because we live in this time of sort of near constant documentation and so it's sort of hard to kind of displace ourselves and look at these documents as rare or having taken much more effort to create. And yet, at the same time they also have a different kind of ontological reality. They weren't kind of created in a time where they were meant to be viewed publicly in the same way. So they weren't created with, they were more private documents. Even though they kind of, they document public space and they document public interests, occasions. They are much more in a kind of private sphere and I find that interesting and sort of actually kind of a lost mentality of a kind. So, I think looking into this time period when people were still not quite used to cameras. Still not quite used to performing for them and being like highly self conscious in front of them. I think, I don't know, I think that we pull certain types of humanity out of that.

- Yeah, and I think for me there's just a, you know, working for an archive like UCLA a lot of the shelf space is occupied by feature films made by a major distributor. Right, that's just the reality of most major archives is that is what has survived and that is what for, maybe not everyone, but for a lot. For most it holds a lot of cultural value, right? Because these are the canonized works. And so what's exciting about working within an archive and searching for maybe these more private documents is just an opportunity for more intimacy, I think. You could accuse the films of the 1940s and 50s when these home movies were made, you could accuse feature films from the same time of being kind of sterile. Of being very presentational. And I think that in a way these documents provide more, a more intimate and private and you might argue in some cases, feminine look at the past. Just because they're existing in a domestic sphere. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're more feminized. And I think Courtney has a whole argument built around that. And how that might not necessarily be true. But I do think, I don't know, it just provides an alternative to history that is not as much, not part of, I don't know, the canon. For lack of a better word. I don't know, I got like just to go on a bit of a tangent. I just inherited this family's, from a friend who goes to estate sales gave me these eight millimeter, these Super 8 millimeter home movies from a family that date, for like, from 1950 to 1956. And just having these and being able to view them in a whole. It just presents, I don't know, there's always like a filter through which you're watching these things. You don't know anything about this family, necessarily. You make all sorts of inferences. But I don't know, it just, it provides a little window into a past that might not have been memorialized on celluloid in the same way that, you know, the lives of the stars that we are familiar with have been memorialized.

- Actually I have one thing just about these particular documents. Because I just re-watched it before we spoke and I was, you know I was thinking, one of the things that's, you know, yes it's beauty contests and weightlifting and it's so much in the kind of mainstream beauty standard here. And yet, it's also a document of I think, different types of bodies than we see today. I mean, I think that when you look at something it's maybe subtle but it's also a kind of different, you know it's documenting a time where the fixation on optimizing certain types of health. Like, performance of health, are just different. I mean, and they're subtle differences. I mean, these are still canon, or you know, they have sort of canonization of kind of beauty and a kind of mainstream. And yet at the same time, I think we can, even if those are oppressive for sure in certain kinds of ways. There's also difference to be found within that. That are sort of more subtle, and we can think about kind of, maybe the against the grain capacities of some of the differences that are kind of not maybe about optimization in the same way that, I don't know, kind of body culture of the last few decades. I don't know, there are.

- Yeah.

- Interesting, you know.

- But even if you think about the sort of, I think popular like, MTV maybe, depiction in the late '80s, early '90s of Muscle Beach. And you think of like, neon colors, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger type of body, this is a pre history to that. In a way that is just, it's one that I had never considered before I'd seen this footage. And so that, to me, is exciting. Looking at this as an almost pre-history to, again, that canonized idea of what Muscle Beach looks like and is or was even two decades ago.

- Yeah, totally. Because it's public exhibitionism but before the kind of media kind of gloss on public exhibitionism of certain kinds. So yeah, I mean I don't know how widely these kinds of images traveled at that time. And I would sort of guess not. I think this was real, actually community space, you know, of a certain kind.

- And I feel like that hits on something that is really amazing about the footage as well as the way you use the footage is that these bodies, as well as their athleticism, are very polished and trained. But also, when you're seeing them in this space, they are performing but it's very informal performance and it's very playful. And that's something that you can't perform. The sort of playfulness that you can see on people's faces. And I feel like that's something home movies can capture in a way, or also home movies made by an amateur who's part of that community, capture in a different way than a documentarian could or sort of even a tourist could as they passed by.

- But I think it's also the times. I mean it just was not the time of American Gladiator, you know. And there was this kind of, yeah, I mean, I do think that it really is also about how people occupy public space in ways that just do not happen anymore. I mean this would all be for cameras now and it would be branded and it would be sponsored and it would, you know, it would just be packaged. And this is just, it's like unpackaged spectacle in a certain way. So yeah, it's sort of riding a median line.

- Well, thank you both so much for chatting. Is there anything else that you wanna share before we let our audience check out, "Mating Games?"

- Just to thank, you know, when we found this footage it was, it had been scanned at kind of a low resolution to be uploaded to Archive.org. And so we reached out to Dino Everett at USC who re-scanned the footage for us so it could be, so that we could show it in higher resolution and really looking as accurate to the color of that footage. Because I believe it's Kodachrome footage. I don't wanna, yeah, so I mean Kodachrome footage is, just has this color tone and quality that you don't find anywhere else. And so to be able to really highlight that, you know, that's all thanks to Dino and his efforts to re-scan that for us. So I just wanna thank Dino again for going through that labor for this little film for us.

- For sure.

- Okay, well thank you, Courtney, K.J. And also Dino Everett from the Hugh Hefner Archive at USC. And everyone please enjoy "Mating Games." ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ So strange and so real ♪ ♪ So strange and so real ♪ ♪ So strange and so real ♪ ♪ Haunting me ♪ ♪ Haunting me ♪ ♪ Haunting me ♪ ♪ How can I tell her ♪ ♪ How can I tell her ♪ ♪ What's in store for me ♪ ♪ What's in store for me ♪ ♪ What's in store for me ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ How can I tell her ♪ ♪ How can I tell her ♪ ♪ How can I tell her ♪ ♪ What's in store for me ♪ ♪ What's in store for me ♪ ♪ What's in store for me ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ I hear a new world ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ Calling me ♪ ♪ Calling me, calling me♪

- To close out tonight's program we're pleased to have a screening of selections from the moving image conservation team at the Smithsonian's National Museum for African American History and Culture. That team consists of Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization specialist. AJ Lawrence, Smith Center media wrangler. Bleakley McDowell, media archivist and conservator. And Candace Ming, media conservation and digitization specialist. They'll share an overview of their project, The Great Migration, and then each team member has selected one of their favorite films from The Great Migration Project. They'll tell you a little bit about their selection and then we'll screen all four of their really fantastic films that they've chosen. But before we get to that, our home movie helper needs to wrap up with her last tips. These ones are about projecting, or maybe speaking more accurately, not projecting your home movies. So here's our home movie helper followed by the team from the National Museum for African American History and Culture's Great Migration project.

- Well hello again, and welcome back to this final section of Home Movie Helper. I am Antonella Bonfanti and projection is really one of my favorite parts of the whole home movie experience. Some of you, in addition to inheriting your home movies, may have also inherited a projector to go along with it. And now you're probably wondering if it's safe to run your home movies through it. The short and simple cautious answer is, no, absolutely not. But the longer, more thoughtful answer is, well, possibly, maybe. In short, if you run a film through a projector you need to be certain of a few things. First of all, is the projector operating correctly? Is the motor running? Does the lamp turn on? Does the take up mechanism work? And is the film running smoothly through the projector? And number two, the film. Is the film projectable? Is it in projectable condition? That means, are all the splices secure? Are there any broken perforations? Is the film too warped or shrunken to screen? To be safe you would want to inspect the films on a set of rewinds prior to running them on a projector. And they, look like this. Perhaps you inherited one of these as well. If you aren't sure but are courageous enough to give it a go, find yourself some scrap foam or ideally some fresh leader to run through the projector before putting your precious and irreplaceable home movies through it. You can also try to find an expert. Contact your local vendor. Your home movie day host, who you can find on the Center for Home Movies website. Or perhaps a historical or archive in your region who may have staff in house with expertise to help you, or at the very least, put you on the right path. If you need projection supplies there are a number of vendors across the United States, including many of your transfer houses will be able to sell you leader or splicing tape or cement. Cans and reels, etc. But a couple of reputable places that I recommend are Boston Connection and Urbanski Film Supplies. So in conclusion, unless you are certain that you have a well functioning projector, I'd strongly discourage you from putting your family's films through the machine, whatever machine you inherited or something you bought on eBay. That said, don't let that discourage you from doing the research, contacting the experts to make sure that whatever machine you're trying to use is actually in workable condition and will not jeopardize your films. Of course, if you've already had them transferred that's also a great opportunity to see what it is that you had. It is certainly the safest way to go about accessing your family films. Thank you for your time and attention. Remember, everyday can be home movie day. Keep those films in a cool, dry place.

- Hello, I'm Ina Archer. I'm, as it says on my lower, a media conservator and digitization specialist at NMAAHC. And I'm just gonna give a quick introduction to what our program is and talk about what my, and I think the whole team's favorite film, that we'll be showing in this program. The Great Migration is a unique, ongoing digitization service program that partners in National Museum of African American History and Culture with individuals and organizations across the United States to preserve their important analog audio visual media. While major motion picture film and television historically lacked diverse representation, black history was instinctively being preserved in everyday home movies. Today these personal narrative serve as an invaluable tool for the understanding and reframing of black moving images, black moving image history and provide a needed visualization of African American history and culture. So, the screen test that I'll be showing, which is a big give away, is from the McMillan family that we digitized at the community curation event in Chicago, 2019. And you'll hear a little bit more about that. I really like the whole idea of film on film. And so you'll have a chance here to kind of see one of our participants seeing themselves in the movies. So, the film that we'll be seeing is called "Emergency!"

- Hi, I'm Bleakley McDowell, media archivist and conservator at National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. And the film I would like to show here came in through the Great Migration program at the museum on March 23rd, 2017. So about a year after we'd started the program with people bringing in their home movies and having them digitized. And this was a collection of Super 8 films brought in by Latoya Foyer. And we're gonna screen about 11 minutes here of silent Super 8 film and it's three complete reels that we digitized. So camera originals are put in the camera. They were shot, there was no editing after that. They were just, you know, a physical piece of film that we digitized entirely. And the first one we'll see is... one of the reasons I like this is because it just looks so fun. It's the Latoya family, most likely, in a park having fun, hanging out on blankets. Yeah just kids, family playing some whiffle ball, baseball. It kind of looks like the summer that probably most of us didn't get to really experience this summer. So it's really nice watching this one because it's very joyous, very fun, very, yeah, just really enjoyable to watch. And you'll see a person with a big Polaroid camera in there at the beginning. It looks great, lots of jump cuts. And then after that we're gonna switch to an anniversary party. And one of the first things you notice is that this film has some damage on it. These films had gotten wet which had caused the emulsion on the film to begin to sort of crack and smear a little bit. So there's lots of dancing on this one. This is inside. Different sort of color pallette, A because it's a bit faded and B, it probably wasn't perfectly exposed, and C, it's got some damage on it. But great costumes, great sunglasses and just glasses in general. Great dancing, people again, having a wonderful time. You know, standing less than six feet away from each other, just partying down. It looks like a real blast. And then finally we're going to see a third film that I think is from a Christmas opening and this one has the most water damage on it and the affect of that is really, I find it really mesmerizing. It's really beautiful. Really sort of ethereal looking. It's, you can't see the image very well but the emulsion is totally smeared into this kind of water color overlay on what you can vaguely make out as sort of ghost like people in the background. It's really amazing to watch and it sort of shows, you know, illustrates the real physicality of this medium that we're saving and how it can be easily damaged and yet still remain beautiful. Then after that we're gonna quickly go to a last couple seconds of another reel from the park that also has some water damage of it. So we'll sort of come out of that ethereal moment. And at the very beginning for about the first 10 seconds we're gonna watch a young girl walk up to the camera and sort of give us a stare down. And that's that.

- Oh, you should say where you are, Blake.

- Oh I am in the media conservation digitization lab at the museum right now. And behind me is our film scanner and our film inspection bench. And over there is some of our video digitization equipment where a lot of this, a lot of the magic happens.

- Hi, I'm Candace Ming, media conservation and digitization specialist at NMAAHC. And my, well it's so hard to pick a favorite, but this one stood out to me. Actually, "Emergency!" is my favorite, and Ina took it, she called it.

- Yeah, it's really good.

- But this one stood out to me also for the Chicago community curation event. We've done three similar events in Denver and Baltimore and what's exciting is we have a media conservation truck and it has a film scanner, it has a full video rack, it has an audio digitization suite and we drive around to different cities and take appointments from individuals and digitize their material on site. So I got to participate in the Chicago one. And this is a really fun video. I actually remember this because it was filmed in the Wisconsin Dells where I used to go as a child. And I remember this, it's called a Superstar Studio, but they basically gave you instruments and a mic and you could lip sync to any song you want. So that is the record of kids performing, "I'm Every Woman" by Chaka Khan. And it's just amazing. And you get to see really cool video effects. And the posterization, the kind of twitchy camera movement. Just an amazing riot of colors which also made it really difficult to digitize. Because there were so many colors in the background.

- Hi, I'm AJ Lawrence. I'm the Robert F. Smith Center media wrangler. Which is a fun title that was a joke on the HR department and we got away with it. Before I introduce the film I wanted to show, I wanted to pitch our finding aid which you can find on the Smithsonian online virtual archives. Which has hundreds of the home movies we've digitized over the past few years and I believe the nice folks at the Exploratorium will be providing a link to that. But they're all streaming, they're all wonderful quality. Some better than others, you know, they're home movies. But almost all of them are fun to watch. And one of the most fun to watch is the one I wanted to present today which is Martha Montgomery's holiday party from around, I think 1970. It was one of the first ones we ever digitized. Martha was one of the lovely volunteers at the museum who we haven't been able to see over the last months. But she brought this in and it's sort of very representative of the surprises we find when we digitize home movies. It's definitely not a sedate holiday party and it features local DC celebrity Iron Jaw Samson who performed some of his famous party tricks. Which makes this really special. Sort of another wonderful DC connection with this is that Fugazi's own Ian MacKaye visited us at the lab and was the person to identify Iron Jaw Samson and immediately pulled up a clip of him on the local TV station on YouTube. So it's wonderful to have that name. Unfortunately through our research we've learned he's no longer with us, so RIP. But love to present to you Iron Jaw Samson at the wild Montgomery family holiday party. ♪ Oo ♪ ♪ Eh ♪ ♪ Oo ♪ ♪ Whatever you want ♪ ♪ Whatever you need ♪ ♪ Anything you want done, baby ♪ ♪ I'll do it naturally ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm every woman ♪ ♪ Every woman ♪ ♪ It's all in me ♪ ♪ It's all in me ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ It's all in me ♪ ♪ Anything you want done, baby ♪ ♪ I'll do it naturally ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ It's all in me ♪ ♪ I can read your thoughts right now ♪ ♪ Every one from A to Z ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ I can cast a spell ♪ ♪ So that you can't tell ♪ ♪ Make a special groove ♪ ♪ Put fire inside of you ♪ ♪ Anytime you feel danger or fear ♪ ♪ Then instantly ♪ ♪ I will appear ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm every woman ♪ ♪ It's all in me ♪ ♪ Anything you want done, baby ♪ ♪ I'll do it naturally ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, I can sense your needs ♪ ♪ Like raining unto the seeds ♪ ♪ I can make a rhyme ♪ ♪ Got confusion in your mind ♪ ♪ And when it comes back to some good old fashioned love ♪ ♪ I've got it, I've got it ♪ ♪ I've got it, got it, got it, baby ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ It's all in me ♪ ♪ Anything you want done, baby ♪ ♪ I'll do it naturally ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ It's all in me ♪ ♪ I can read your thoughts right now ♪ ♪ Every one from A to Z ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ I ain't braggin' ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm the one ♪ ♪ Just ask me ♪ ♪ Oo, it shall be done ♪ ♪ Don't bother to compare ♪ ♪ Got it, ♪ ♪ Oo I got it ♪ ♪ I got it, got it, got it, yeah ♪ ♪ I, I ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ That you need ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ Oh, all that you need now, baby ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ I'm every woman, baby ♪ ♪ I'm every woman ♪ ♪ Oo ♪ ♪ I'm every woman♪