Trying to see what they saw
Dad found some 8mm / 16mm film in the basement and had it encoded digitally. He went in blind - he had no real idea of what any of it was. We've been watching some of it now over christmas. Plenty of footage (literally footage!) of me and my sister as kids, but what was more interesting was film my father's father and my mother's father had shot. They both died before I was born, or before I was old enough to remember them, so I've only seen a few pictures and heard some stories.
My mom's dad was an engineer and went to America for half a year to educate himself. This was in 1953, so he went by boat. Filming something back then was a very resource-intensive task - the equipment was heavy, complicated, and expensive. I thought about why he felt it was important to film what he did. A panorama shot of New York from the Empire State building. The Statue of Liberty. The Golden Gate bridge. These are clichéd establishment shots to us, but to an engineer from Norway in the 50's? To someone without a TV but who understands what it takes to build something at that scale, it must have been amazing!
My mom's dad was an engineer and went to America for half a year to educate himself. This was in 1953, so he went by boat. Filming something back then was a very resource-intensive task - the equipment was heavy, complicated, and expensive. I thought about why he felt it was important to film what he did. A panorama shot of New York from the Empire State building. The Statue of Liberty. The Golden Gate bridge. These are clichéd establishment shots to us, but to an engineer from Norway in the 50's? To someone without a TV but who understands what it takes to build something at that scale, it must have been amazing!