Making Movies

My Mom was an avid film photographer. She had this really neat Kodak 8 mm wind-up camera that fit in the palm of one hand. She made reels and reels of family movies. We had a projector, screen, and splicing machine. The small movie rolls were spliced together on the splicing machine by trimming the film, overlapping it and gluing the pieces together with a special glue. These were put on several large and medium reels and kept in the old-style metal containers. This is all in the category of "Man, they don't make'm like they used to." Ronnie has the reels now and we need to get them converted to DVD before they disintegrate. My favorite reel was an old collection of black and white cartoons with Mickey, Donald, Goofy, etc.

Watching the movies over and over, starting near the time they were shot, has the effect of indelibly imprinting the events on your brain. And not only the events, but I can remember somewhat how I felt during those events - I was having fun, I was thinking this or that, I was miserable, I remember that toy (whatever happened to it?), and the like. I suppose I need to get the reels from Ronnie and get the job done. It may be interesting for my sons and Verna to see me in movies from birth to about 10 or 11 years old, but they cannot relive the experience like I can. There are hours and hours of footage, so we are talking boring to everyone except me.

The old Kodak projector: it had a very bright, very hot light bulb and would heat up the room very quickly. And it was very heavy: a solid cast iron structure with machined steel parts. At an early age, I learned to thread it and how to splice the film when it broke. I loved the reverse feature. At any time you could flip the switch and put the action in reverse to make people come out of a swimming pool back on to the diving board, make smoke go back into a fire, and other fun things. When a reel was done, then you had to rethread in a different way and go to fast rewind to send it from the take up reel back to the original reel. And, of course, you had to always keep extra bulbs around to replace them when they burned out. This was a lot more fun that just popping in a DVD. You had to work at it.

The old Kodak camera was pretty versatile. You could do double exposures (which happened sometimes by accident) and you could take one frame at a time. I took the camera to college with me at Sam Houston State and, using the one-frame-at-a-time feature, produced an animated film. To this day, I do not know what happened to that film. Maybe when I get my hands on the old reels it will be with them. Kinda doubt it.

Maybe films, animation and special effects are in the genes somewhere.