What contribution did you make today, to our wonderful hobby ?

[Douglas Meltzer]

Melvin,

You are so right about there being more to what makes this hobby so enjoyable than just watching films. Often a better part of the day can be spent repairing a projector, cleaning old films, improving your sound system or working on your screening room.
I'm currently in the early stages of re-recording an Italian Super 8mm digest of the 1966 science fiction film War of the Planets (I diafanoidi vengono da Marte). I've already filmed the digest off the screen (with the both the GS-1200 and the camera running at 23.976 fps). Now I'm working in Adobe Premiere to match the scenes with those from the English language DVD. When that's done, I'll use the GS to record the new soundtrack. This is time consuming, however I really enjoy these projects.

Doug

[Melvin England]

I thought I would start this thread in the same spirit as "What 8mm films did you see last night?"..........except actually projecting films is banned from this thread!!

So I ask the question........What contribution did you make today, to our wonderful hobby? What were you meddling with that was to do with the hobby that was not actually projecting films. Was it a day spent rewinding? Cleaning some newly acquired feature? What then ?

For me, I have just received a copy of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The 4x 400' black and white version of what was a color film. It was from Ebay.... and it had a bit of a pong to it. The boxes has that awful dank, wiffy smell to them and the films smelt as though they had never seen film cleaner. I had several days previously, projected the film and it ran quite well, but was not going to tolerate the odour wreaking out the Man Cave!

So......

Out of the boxes they came. The boxes were then wiped down with one of those anti bacterial wipes, then internally sprayed with a little Febreze to sweeten them up.....and left for a period of time to let the air get to them.

The film was transferred temporarily to four take up spools and their original manky ones dunked in a bowl of warm water with a bit of liquid and given a good clean. Then ran under a clean tap to get rid of the suds, wiped again, and allowed to dry naturally.

The film, of course, was given a good dose of cleaner and wiped, and allowed to vent in the open air for a little while, too. Net result..... sweet smelling boxes, clean spools, and film smelling like film should smell. I just need to project them again sometime!