Weird and Wonderful Filmstrips

[beep!] Turn the knob to advance to the next slide

Author

David Friedman
August 20, 2024

Before we get to today’s topic, I want to remind everyone that I made a new daily word puzzle game called Gisnep! Hundreds of people are playing every day, and I especially thank those who have sent in ideas for improvements, or bugs you’ve run into. An update is in the works that’s going to bring a lot of nice new features. I want to turn those hundreds of daily players into thousands, so if you haven’t played yet, go try it out!

Depending on when you grew up, you may have had filmstrip presentations in school. These were rolls of 35mm film projected one frame at a time onto a screen, accompanied by audio played on a record or cassette. When you heard a beep, some student who was picked to run the projector turned a knob that advanced it to the next frame while the teacher got to take a little break.

Filmstrips were weird and wacky and often cringe-inducing. Some typical examples of the genre include:

The Scooby Gang in “What is Acne”?

I always wanted to be the kid who got to turn the knob. But eventually, my school got a machine that would advance to the next frame automatically. That wasn’t nearly as fun.

I hadn’t seen old filmstrips in decades, so I was delighted to stumble on a YouTube channel a few years ago called Uncommon Ephemera that was digitizing them and posting them online. The format itself is so nostalgic that it didn’t even matter that most of them were ones I’d never seen. They were all fascinating to look at.

The videos were lovingly done. The film scans were high-resolution and clean. The “advance to the next frame” animation felt just right and brought me back to the fifth grade classroom.

The channel was run by a guy named Mark O’Brien who, as far as he could tell, is the only person preserving these old educational filmstrips. And the work is truly arduous. A lot of old filmstrips are sadly faded and need a lot of restoration work. And the audio tracks need high quality digitization from cassette or records.

Scanning these filmstrips is a labor of love and clearly time consuming. Mark spends several days on each one. And he has thousands of filmstrips to go through.

Some of Mark’s thousands of filmstrip rolls

I enjoyed going through his archive. Then suddenly, all the videos on the channel disappeared.

While most of the companies that created these filmstrips are long gone, it turned out that the assets from one company had been acquired by Scholastic, Inc. They complained to YouTube and the channel got a copyright strike.

A few days later, the channel got a second strike from another company that acquired some music that was heard on a cassette Mark digitized.

On YouTube, if you get three strikes then your channel gets taken down for good. So Mark voluntarily took everything down before YouTube could, and slowly re-uploaded everything to the Internet Archive, where you can find the complete collection today as he continues to scan more filmstrips.

Meanwhile, he has resumed uploading some filmstrips to YouTube to increase their visibility because people aren’t stumbling on them in the Internet Archive the same way people do on YouTube.

The Preservation Process

I got curious about how Mark does it, where he gets this old filmstrips, and how he got started. So I reached out to him with a few questions. Here are some of his answers, condensed and edited:

How did you get started?

In 2018 I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer after a year or two of excessive fatigue. In that recovery period after the thyroidectomy, I began looking back into filmstrips. I was dismayed, when I looked back into it, that nobody had done any work saving them in all that time. So I was in a place where I couldn’t keep a regular schedule that an employer would justifiably expect from me, but I wasn’t bedridden nor did I just want to sit around and play Xbox for the rest of my life. I’m also on the autism spectrum but too old and the area too devoid of good doctors to get help with that, either. So working out in the real world has always been a struggle for me anyway, where the politics of interacting with your coworkers always reflects more on you than the actual work you’re there to do.

Then the pandemic hit, and at least around here, if you didn’t have COVID for that first year or so, you essentially couldn't see a doctor for anything. At some point I had to keep doing this just to stay sane, and almost pretend I was working through the pandemic too, even though I was making no money.

Where do you get the filmstrips?

When I started doing this, I was buying filmstrips on eBay and Craigslist when the price was right. Sometimes you’d find somebody who was selling several hundred for $50 or something. In the beginning I needed film that I could just use to create a process for getting it preserved.

In 2022 I got a donation from a single collector in Michigan of over 2,000 filmstrips [link goes to unboxing video]. While I am unquestionably grateful, it’s probably going to take me another ten years to get them all scanned.

How do you scan them?

Film scanners exist for people in Hollywood. They’re the size of three refrigerators and start at about $700,000. But for the rest of us, we get flatbed scanners that can scan a strip of six 35mm still photos. So I have to scan them on a flatbed scanner - and, as a result, cut them into strips about as long as a film negative.

So, as insane as it sounds, that’s the process: Carefully turn the filmstrips into shorter filmstrips, put them in one of those film holders that come with the scanner, and scan them. I’m scanning at effectively 8K, and that takes about three minutes per frame over two passes - the first for the image on the film, and a second pass with infrared light. The second pass results in a map of dust and scratches (even though the film is cleaned first, I there will always be one or two microscopic pieces of dust in the air that will inevitably stick to the film on its way to the scanner, and scratches are permanent) that is used to do some automatic image cleaning before the frame is saved. 

Wait, what? He cuts them to scan them? Oh no. That breaks my heart. It pains me to hear. But which is the better option? Let these old filmstrips fade away unpreserved where nobody will ever see them, or digitize them for the future while destroying them in the process? I’m honestly a bit torn.

In my personal life, I’m not precious about my physical things. I think in all those years living in tiny apartments in New York City with no storage space, I came to prefer bits over atoms. So I scanned all my childhood notebooks, papers, etc, that were taking up boxes and filing cabinets and recycled the originals. I’m much more likely to look at an old paper I wrote if I can just find it on my hard drive than if I have to find it in a box. But it’s my stuff and I’m free to make that decision. I’m not sure my grandkids or their kids will care enough to keep my digital archive preserved on future formats, but by then it won’t matter to me anyway.

But film is part of our cultural heritage, and I feel a bit differently about it. So many old movies have been lost to time. And yet in the absence of any other efforts to save the originals, maybe this actually is the best way to preserve them.

At least Mark does keep the originals, although cut up, in case better scanning or restoration methods come up in the future.

What are your favorite filmstrips?

I have a few favorites: “The Art of Pantomime in Church” is this weird mashup of clowns and Christians and I have no idea how it even got made. The thesis is that professional clown Randall Bane can teach you how to incorporate pantomime into your church services. I have no dog in this fight, I’m not particularly anti-Christian or even anti-clown, but I literally do not understand how I struggle to get by and yet there was money to produce this thing.

“How to Get Gonorrhea” and its counterpart “How to Get Syphilis” are endearingly-cringey STD filmstrips from 1974 and feature insane art and illustrations. That’s the other thing, there’s so much insane hand-drawn art on filmstrips and a lot of it has the potential to be enjoyed both ironically and non-ironically. Artists, illustrators, actors, narrators, and the people who worked on these things were often not credited as they would be in a movie or TV show, and it’s a terrible shame that all this amazing original work is just being lost.

Speaking of illustrators, there’s a two-part filmstrip set called “What Do You Do About Rules?” that was illustrated by Gray Morrow, who was co-creator of Marvel Comic’s Man-Thing and creator of the original El Diablo for DC Comics. Nobody knows it exists, even comic book nerds.

I have a set of 44 Mormon filmstrips used to teach LDS Church fundamentals to children that is one of the most confidently awkward things I’ve ever seen. In “I Can’t Do It, Coach,” a track star’s coach somehow appears in his bedroom the night before a big race and tries to get him to drink alcohol to calm his nerves, he refuses due to his faith; all the other kids on the team get sick from coach’s hooch, he now has to win all his team's races, and does. Because, y’know, God.

Mark Needs Help

Preserving the film strips is a lengthy and expensive process. If you have the time and interest, Mark could use some help.

I wouldn’t mind having some people help doing the cropping and straightening… I could also use a web person. All of these filmstrips are in a project management database that I built so I could keep track of all this stuff, and I figure I should have build sort of site similar to IMDB or Discogs but about filmstrips, using that data, as no such thing exists anywhere. I just don’t have the time, expertise, energy, patience, etc. to make it work much less make it look pretty and be usable.

He also has a GoFundMe and Patreon for monetary donations to help continue the work. An he even has an Amazon Wish List with everything from batteries and hard drives all the way up to a high end $32,045 scanner that would speed up the process and negate the need to cut the filmstrips.

I am in desperate need of financial help. Without exaggeration, I am losing my ass doing this. I’m making $200/mo on Patreon on a good month (and 25% of that is one person)… I put up a fundraiser in July on GoFundMe [with a $20,000 goal] and I’ve raised maybe $900.

As part of his fundraising, Mark has put together this really good video showing the process of how he restores these film strips. If you appreciate anything you’ve seen, you’ll want to watch it:

If you do have the means, Mark’s fundraising home page is https://uncommonephemera.org/donate with links to all the ways you can contribute.

And that’s it for another newsletter! [Beep!]

I’m not asking for any donations this time. You can donate to Mark instead if you’re inclined to make a contribution. [Beep!]

But I am asking you to play Gisnep, and tell all your friends about it! [Beep!]

Today’s Gisnep is actually on the harder side, so if you get frustrated it’s not you, it’s me. [Beep!]

Until next time, thanks as always for reading. [Beep!]

David

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