HOME MOVIES KEEP MEMORIES ALIVE (2-2003)

If you have a family, or if you’re in one, chances are you 
are quite familiar with home movies. And although the 
characters and subject matter might be similar, the manner 
in which home movies are captured and played back is quite 
different from the shaky old Super-8 movies of the 1970s. 
And even they were better than the regular 8-mm home movies 
of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s, my dad owned a 
movie camera that used spools of 8-mm film. The film was 
actually 16 millimeters wide and had sprocket holes down 
both edges, because half way through the filming, you had 
to take the spool out and flip it over in order to expose 
the other side. 

When it was used up, which took less than 5 minutes of 
shooting time, you had to take it down to the drugstore to 
get it developed. It took about a week.

The projector was another piece of equipment you had to own 
if you actually wanted to watch the movies you made. And it 
took a certain kind of skill, or luck, to be able to thread 
the film through the sprockets so that it wouldn’t make 
everyone talk with great vibrato. 

Dad would buy the larger film spools and then splice 
together three or four 50-foot segments of film to make a 
reasonably sized home movie. But realistically, you could 
be expected to sit still and watch for only so long, 
because there was no sound. It got old after the first 10 
minutes or so.

In the 1970s, a new kind of Super-8 movie film came out. It 
had a magnetic stripe down one edge of the film for 
recording sound. And the film came in a handy one-step 
cartridge that made it easy to load into the camera. 

Both kinds of technology meant that, in order to see your 
home movies, you had to gather into a darkened room, set up 
a projector and a screen and then thread the film into the 
projector before you could watch a second of the movie. It 
was cumbersome.

That’s why the home video camera, and shortly thereafter 
the camcorder, were so revolutionary when they appeared in 
the 1980s. It was the camcorder that made home movies so 
easy and inexpensive. Family movie-making became more of a 
necessity than a luxury.

Camcorders meant that you could throw away your tired old 
projector. Most people already owned VCRs, but even if they 
didn’t, they could watch their home movies fed straight 
from the camcorder to the TV. And instead of five minutes’ 
worth of film, you had six hours’ worth of tape you could 
watch. It created a different sort of problem.

The latest in home movie-making still involves the 
camcorder, but the picture quality has been enhanced 
through digital technology. And you are no longer 
restricted to watching your productions on a standard TV 
set. You can watch them on the tiny screen that is attached 
to the camera itself, or you can feed them into your 
computer and watch them on your monitor.

It’s even possible to capture your home movies with your 
computer and burn them onto a CD for viewing on your DVD 
player. Unlike video tape, digital video discs do not 
deteriorate over time. And even if you lose or break one, 
you can make another one as long as you remember to keep a 
copy of the video file on your computer’s hard drive.

Yes, home movie making has come a long way from the old 8-
mm days of long ago. But the reasons for taking home movies 
in the first place have not changed. Home movies make it 
easier to keep the best memories of all those things that 
are worth remembering.