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Saturday, 13 October 2012

Home Movie Day at the Cinema Museum - 20 October 2012

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Home Movie Day (HMD) is a rather lovely thing that takes place every year where people can take their old home movies along to a local event (it's worldwide) and show them on the projectors made available for use and get advice on looking after them, getting them transferred etc.

In England the venue is the Cinema Museum in London (lucky for me).

Apart from a 1pm pre-planned showing of some of Hitchcock's home movies you never really know what's going to turn up and it's fairly pot luck. Last year when I went (for the first time) a man was talking about film footage he'd taken as a boy while at Rugby School. There was also some footage of the King's Coronation.

It was rather lovely to stand in a darkened room and hear the projector whirring away, it's a rather cosy sort of experience which is enhanced by the fact that tea and cake is available. I took the photos at the end of this post last year (2011) and fell in love with the Kalee projectors - there's an amazing shot among them of one of them (embiggened below) lit up by a shaft of sunlight, that was just coincidence, it wasn't the arclight that would have powered them when in use!

I also thought this was interesting, from the umbrella organisers, about the risks of people assuming that transferring their old reels to VHS or DVD meant they were safely stored forever:

"[the organisers of the event] also knew that many people were having their amateur films transferred to videotape or DVD, with the mistaken idea that their new digital copies would last forever and the "obsolete" films could be discarded. Original films (and the equipment required to view them) can long outlast any version on VHS tape, DVDs, or other digital media. Not only that, but contrary to the stereotype of the faded, scratched, and shaky home movie image, the original films are often carefully shot in beautiful, vibrant color—which may not be captured in a lower-resolution video transfer. "

Home Movie Day
Saturday 20 October 2012, 11am-5pm, Cinema Museum, Dugard Way (near Newington Butts, by Elephant and Castle. It's a short walk from the 133 bus stop which goes from London Bridge and not a million miles away from the 53 bus which goes to the Coronet cinema in Elephant & Castle from Blackheath / Deptford / Greenwich etc).

More information
    Kalee film projectors at the Cinema Museum
    by me, taken this time last year

    Kalee film projector at the Cinema MuseumKalee film projector - Cinema Museum, KenningtonCinema fittings - stalls signc 1917 cinema fittingKalee film projectors at the Cinema MuseumCinema Museum, Kennington - outside


    Cinema Museum, a set on Flickr.Pictures taken at the Home Movie Day in 2011.
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