Monday, January 23, 2012

Pixelizing the past

OUR WEB SERVICES FOLKS are working with Admissions to come up with a new promotional video for the Mount. Romesh Fernando noticed on an online archives inventory that we have old film, video and audio stored here and was curious to see if there were any historic images that could be used.

The reels are a bit mysterious because they're not adequately labeled, and of course we can't look at them without the "antique" playback equipment. Anyone seen a home movie projector lately?

Romesh borrowed a couple of reels and had them digitized by the friendly people at Digital Pickle in Pasadena.

The still photo above is a frame captured from some footage of nursing students and faculty doing their clinicals at a local hospital. Other results revealed color home movies from a swim meet, a volleyball match and graduation that fell sometime between 1949 and 1956. There is no sound with any of this stuff, but it's quite exciting -- and a bit eerie -- to see these 50- or 60-year-old moving images reanimated on a computer screen. It'll be fun to see what else turns up and how it gets used in a new online video.

Back in the days of those Super 8 movie cameras, who would have imagined YouTube? Here's a more recent version of what we've got in those mysterious film cans.