introduceyourself

Hi - my name is Brian. I collect TV commercials. Old TV commercials. On 16mm film.

Ten plus years ago I bought a gizmo that transfers 16mm film to video - and started uploading. Commercials, educational films, industrial films - unique content usually.

The gizmo is a converted film projector that shoots into a video camera and transfers film slower than the film normally runs. That goes into a computer via firewire. The computer has been replaced a few times now... primarily for speed and sometimes for hardware that just died.

I have commercials waiting for me to transfer that I bought last fall from someone who got them from an estate of a television engineer who worked in West Virginia. Unfortunately, anything of 'local interest' was donated to the local historical society but there are still lots of things that haven't been seen.

Example: a commercial from Aetna insurance that showed (in the late 1960's) how to escape a car that has entered the water. Sound familiar? It should - Mythbusters visited this myth in 2007. At the time this film was sitting in someone's garage, unseen in forty years.

Hopefully there's content as interesting as this in the content to come...