No matter how you slice it...film collecting is messy business.

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

No matter how you slice it...film collecting is messy business.

Sure, if rich you can match your cans, barcode, have lots of horizontal or vertical film shelves and temperature-controlled film vaults...but it still boils down to film cans or reels on shelving...or the floor.

And when you run out of shelving, you use the floor for shelving. I found this photo on the internet, along with the rest of these photos. This guy titled it reorganizing film, so maybe he has the shelving, and the floor storage is just temporary. 35mm is for the big boys. I just deal with 8mm and 16mm.

 

Temporary or not, floor storage is very common for film collectors if you are short on space or shelving. 

It is common to see film jammed on shelves any way they can fit.

Here is a smaller collector and is neater about it in his man cave...

In the old days they made film shelving to store film vertically. But they are very rare to come across nowadays and they cost $$ when you do find them.

For me it has been a lifetime of being short on space. Space cost $ and I've always worked on a shoestring budget, consequently I have always been short on space. Even growing up I had no space as a kid. My parents didn't have a lot of $ and I grew up in a 1 bath 4 room house in L.A. My bedroom was a foldout bed in the living room. 

An old gal down the street saw some of my film archive and said I was a hoarder.

Some of my films being organized from M-R... 

I told her I'm not a hoarder, I'd just short on space. I've got a few million feet of film and if I had more space and shelving the same thing, she called hoarding, would not be so jammed up. So, if I am a hoarder, it is being a 'hoarder by design' and not by desire. I rather have tons of space and shelving...but I don't. A real hoarder fills up any space they get no matter how large. That is the acid test.

Anyway, she inspired me to expand my shelving for cine' film with 3 or 4 more 6-foot-tall chrome wire shelving units. I don't have that much room for them, but I can put them on casters and double stack them. When I need something from the rear shelf unit, I pull out the shelf unit in front of it. 

I am not really a film collector; I'm a film archivist. I don't necessarily want the films; I just want decent digital scans of the films. My goals changed in 2023 from maintaining a physical archive to becoming a digital archive. But it is a benefit to education as well as the archival record when you can handle, inspect and smell the films versus just dealing with scans. And in the big picture, it is hard to get rid of everything even if you want to go all digital. It takes lots of time to dispose of things properly unless you just trash it all in a dumpster.

16mm IBT Dye Transfer Technicolor Lab Head

DDTJRAC

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Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography

 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Now...if you are low on space and want narrow aisles between your shelving...

I've found that 14" -16" is the minimum for aisle space for me to work in. If you are anorexic, then maybe 12" aisles are good for you. Either way narrow aisles only allows for working sideways, rubbing your stomach or back along the shelving and not much room to pull and organize things. A better shelving aisle to work out of is 30" - 36". But space is $$.

If you do go for double and triple stacking of shelves on caster with no aisles, then get 4" casters and not the 3" casters. 4" allows for half-ass easy moving. And rolling works best on concrete or hard floors, not carpet. But you can roll on carpets, you just may need help if you have lots of weight. The heavy shelving sinks into the carpet and forms a dent that it must be pulled out of.

They make 5" casters, but you need a 1/4 - 20 screw size for most chrome wire shelving. And once you go to 5", the casters use larger diameter screws. You check it out...I can't breastfeed it all to you.

 

 

Edited February 14 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.