Search the Community

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 <><><><> 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

It is unusual that films come with a scan, but this film did. It was a MP4 file, about 300 mb. You buy a film for $10...you get a scan for free. It was a decent scan for online use; the only problem was the film was faded pink and had no color left to recover. You know the type, if you have been around old film... eBay photo ~ Fair Use I have a ton of these pink films in the archive. What I do it to turn them into B&W. That is what I did here. 'The Lumberman' (1965) Encyclopedia Britannica 'The Lumberman' (1965) D. D. Teoli Jr. A. C. : D. D. Teoli Jr. A. C. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive No idea how many red films I have. I will have an idea if and when I ever get them all inventoried. I'm maybe 55% done with the inventory. I haven't done any work in that area for a few years. I still need to organize the shelves in ABC order. This area will be for 'M to R' films. There is a duplicate set of shelves behind this set for 'S to Z.' 'H' section has its own shelf unit, is the biggest section. Tons of H-ome movies there. Small gauge film is the largest area of archival preservation I work in...yet it is the least utilized material in the archive, as I have no decent scanner. Film preservation is a fascinating area to work in. It is like Christmas every day when you are working with 'pig in a poke' films. No idea what you will find! Can't go by the reels or cans. Much of it never matches the film or films have no labeling at all. <><><><> 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

I was going to try the database software at Open Office freeware. But it said I needed Java. Not knowing much about computers or even having faith in my ability to use Open Office, other than as a word processor, I gave up with the Java quest. Today it hit me, I can just make a master folder for my film Archive. I can make text files within the master folder. Each film gets a text file made for it. I can make a text template to paste in each text folder to standardize the info. Now I have an easy-to-use database that is alphabetized and searchable. And If I want to get fancy, I can make the folders suitable for JPEGs and put a few screen shots of each film in each folder. That was what a film collector did with his collection. He would take photos off the screen as he projected the films and put a handful of photos in each film entry. (Although he used fancy database software of some sort for the rest of the work.) It is very easy to get screen shots when you scan a film. You just hit export on the scanner software and boom...you get 5,000 or 10,000 or 30,000 JPEG or TIFF stills. (Of course, if you want them from a scanning company, you pay a few hundred $$ extra for that service.) I can also use my system for the VHS Archive as well. Nearly a thousand VHS, VHS-C and Betamax tapes to organize. Will I do it and get it all computerized in 1990's tech?? (Or is it 1980s?) Don't know. Right now, my goal is to put all the films in the Archive in alphabetical order, label the cans and then write them down in a hand-written log. After than...who knows? But at least I'm excited I have the option if I want it. Even though I write a lot here, I'm not much for typing into the 'puter when it comes to filling out forms. But it is nice being able to search films for content; especially with the home movies that cover a multitude of content areas. <><><><> 16mm GB (Gaumont-British) Reel Selection from Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Reel & Can Archive Contributed to the DDTJRAC and photographed by: The Old Film Company