Grandfather's Mystery 8mm film

 

Recently when we were cleaning up my grandfather's house when he had fallen ill and could not live on his own anymore, I came across a box of film reels at the bottom of the wardrobe. At the time I just assumed they were films his late brother, Don had made as he always seemed to be travelling overseas. I was going to leave them in the wardrobe, and move on.

While I was cleaning up, I did not hesitate in grabbing some of the slides that were around as I knew I had something that would scan them, but no idea what to do with the film. To explain the slides, they are basically film negatives before the film negatives that are commonly seen for cameras before anything digital. I will write another blog about those soon. Before heading home to Australia, I mentioned the film and speculated if they were my grandfathers. On closer look the labels mentioned locations like Portugal and a wedding with a journey from France to Iran. The wedding film I knew the story behind as there were also slides for this particular journey. I then knew for a fact they were my grandfather's films as he made a journey in 1962 from Paris to Turkey, Iran, India and onto Nepal by landrover. Not only were there slides for this, but also his travel diary from that period in time that ended in him gaining employment on a project on the Ord River in Western Australia.

The film didnt come home with me, but arrived weeks later with another family member who came over from New Zealand on holiday. I knew there were businesses that could convert the films to digital and by pure accident I ended up watching a Youtube video about a film scanner. I ordered that specific film scanner from Amazon and it actually arrived several days later.

I soon learnt that scanning the film onto a SD card was time consuming and I had to keep an eye on the process as there were breakages. The film was fragile in places and would break, but the worst was really annoying as the reel I was using was not big enough to hold full film and the first lot fell off the smaller reel. That took several hours trying to wind it back onto the big reel, so I could set the film to rewind. How I got around the breakages was to tie string to the film so it would stay together. Not what I am supposed to do, but it worked. For the length of time it took to scan the film, would give me around several minutes of film. I never edited them in any way as I was just after the pure recording. Something else I should point out is there was no sound. I did find that I had a spare large reel amongst the film, so I did not have to worry about more film falling off the smaller reel

I think I have scanned nearly all the films that I have in my possession and they were actually all of my grandfathers so I am glad that I have salvaged them from vanishing forever. Some of the films include trips between Australia and New Zealand especially during his time at North Kirra surf life saving club on the Gold Coast, His journey from New Zealand to England with stops along the way that included Singapore, Morocco, Egypt and England. This was all by ship before air travel so it is really something else. I am actually really happy to see what life was like back in the 1960s and 1970s, especially of different locations. You never know I might even find more film to record as I now have something to get it done on.