BBC Reports on the Value of Home Movies & Real Film

Old-fashioned home movies, the kind on actual reels that sometimes turn up, unlabeled, in attics, are actually valuable sources of evidence about the way people lived in a certain time. As the BBC reports, the British Film Institute (BFI) and the BBC have teamed up to archive the historical tidbits that can be found in the background of old family films. They have requested family films, which will be used in the Home Movies Roadshow series.

In the article, "Would you rescue home movies from a burning house?", Robin Baker (head curator at the BFI) comments on the value of film and how home cinematographers only captured the key moments so as not to be wasteful, saying of video, "Now you can shoot all the time and the result can be rather long and boring. But with film they kept shots short because of the cost. The result is much more engaging and varied."

It's definitely true that shooting on film forces the filmmaker to be careful and economical; your eye always has to be out for the best moment to record permanently on film, and sometimes patience is a virtue. Instead of coming back from a wedding or event with hours and hours of video footage to wade through, searching for those special moments, we have already found them.

Take a look at how Hello Super 8 does old-school, invaluable family films.