UCLA’s Department of Information Studies will present its first-ever Home Movie Day on Oct. 18, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., in the IS Lab, located in the GSE&IS Building, North Campus. As part of the annual, international Home Movie Day event, HMD@UCLA will celebrate the personal and cultural documentation that these films represent. Participants are invited to bring their 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm films for inspection, assessment, and screening by local film archivists.
Films may be submitted for preparation in advance during open hours in the Media & Information Technology (MIT) Lab in the GSE&IS Building beginning on Oct. 1. Participants may also simply bring their films with them the day of the event—organizers will prep and show as many films as possible during the course of the day. The family-friendly event will include door prize drawings and “Home Movie Day Bingo” among the activities, and free parking will be provided in Lot 5, conveniently located across the road from the GSE&IS Building.
IS lecturer Snowden Becker is a co-founder of Home Movie Day and the nonprofit Center for Home Movies; she is also the program manager of the Moving Image Archive Studies (MIAS) program at UCLA. She urges students, faculty, staff, and the public to take part in this free event, whether or not they have home movies to share.
“Hosting a Home Movie Day event here on campus creates a terrific opportunity for our students to share their preservation knowledge with home movie owners, hone their small-gauge film-handling skills, and work behind the scenes on event organization,” says Becker. “The advance submissions will enable us to hold weekly ‘Film Prep Fridays’ before the event, where students can learn from real-life examples about the preservation challenges encountered with family film collections. Many of our students will go on to host Home Movie Day events at the institutions they work for after graduation, so this event is one more way the MIAS program has impact on media preservation and community-based archiving efforts in Los Angeles and beyond. Not only that, but it’s just so much fun to see these films of your friends, neighbors, fellow students and faculty members from decades ago!”
To attend HMD@UCLA, or for more information, contact Snowden Becker at becker@gseis.ucla.edu, or follow the event on Twitter via @homemoviedayla. Click here for a map with directions to the GSE&IS Building and parking information.
Above: Snowden Becker, program manager of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies (MIAS) program (at center), and first-year MLIS students Scott Reed and Jana Gowan, prepare submissions for the first-ever Home Movie Day, hosted by UCLA’s Department of Information Studies.