THANKS TO EVERYBODY WHO MADE THIS PROJECT A SUCCESS!!
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YOUR FUNDING GETS COOL PUBLIC DOMAIN FILMS ONLINE AND GETS YOU NEAT STUFF - DVDs, T-shirts, Posters and more!
UPDATE: We've started digitizing films! You can view them here:![]()
http://av-geeks.tumblr.com/
Over the past two decades the A/V Geeks have rescued over 24,000 old 16mm educational films..
from landfills, dumpsters, basements and school libraries.
Some of these important cultural artifacts have not been seen in over 80 years!
All of these gems in the A.V Geeks archive can provide an entertaining and insightful glimpse into our past and include strange titles like Monkeys Meet the People, I Just Don't Dig Him, USS VD – Ship of Shame, and You Can Beat the A-Bomb.
With your help, the A/V Geeks will digitize 100 miles of film and share them online for the world to enjoy.
Up to 1,000 public domain films (245 hours) can be watched,
downloaded, researched and repurposed for creative projects.
Every $35 contribution will digitize 10 minutes of film! Even $1 will give us the funds to put up a short 1970s TV commercial.
For every $500 raised, 1 mile of film will be shared online for worldwide
access.
Your contribution can get you awesome perks... Help pick the films to digitize, stickers, DVDs, t-shirts, an A/V Geeks screening at your event ---and more!
Watch new films each day of the campaign at www.avgeeks.com. This project allows the A/V Geeks to dedicate the time, equipment and resources needed to catalog, prep, digitize, and upload the films from their unique and vast archive.
This campaign ends August 31, 2012.
It's an A/V Geeks road rally...come along for the ride!
So far, we've raised funds for over 28 miles of footage! That's nearly 69 hours of film content!
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WHY? How important is an old 16mm school film? Sure, they can be corny and funny to watch but they also can teach us a lot about our cultural past. We see what was important to our society. We see our society's hopes and fears. We remember our immediate past (how to use a rotary telephone, when computers were first made, arguments for why it was important for the United States to go metric, for example).. Also, surprisingly, some of these films are actually quite good and their points are still relevant.
WHAT? We have a list of over 1700 digitization candidates from the collection. We've researched their copyright status to make sure they are public domain. We've picked some of our favorites to be on the digitization list, but we'd also like your input. If you donate over a certain level, you can vote for which films to digitize.
Also, there are over 1500 films in our collection that haven't been cataloged. We don't know what they are as the titles were ripped off the cans. If this project is funded, we can spend some time going through the unknown films, discovering their titles and, if they are public domain, we could potentially digitize some of them.
The list of candidates can be found in a PDF in the Gallery section of this campaign.
WHERE WILL THE PLEDGES GO? Funds raised by this project will help pay for the time and equipment needed to catalog, curate, prep, clean, digitize, post-process, upload and share the films online via the Internet Archive, Youtube, etc.
The funds from this project are split up as such..
Fundraising costs - IndieGoGo takes a percentage for processing the credit cards and running the site. Then there are the costs of the perks - making the DVDs, t-shirts, stickers and the shipping costs. That lops off a good amount.
Equipment costs - Film transfer costs are expensive because the equipment is so expensive. Some of the funds we are raising will go towards paying off the immense cost of the film telecine and the support equipment (computer and digitizing card).
Supplies - Some of the funds are going towards film leader and film cleaning supplies that we are using to do this project.
Our Time - It takes more than 10 minutes to digitize a 10 minute film. We have to research the film's copyright status, locate the film in the collection, find the best copy, clean and prep the film, digitize the film, edit it and tweak the colors and audio levels in Final Cut Pro and finally, upload the film with the metadata. It can take x3 to x4 the running time of a film to get the final video you see online.
Other expenses - Internet. We're uploading files nearly around the clock and that fast internet connection is expensive. Also, we are buying hard drives for all the files we are creating.
HOW? We have a 16mm film transfer machine (a telecine) and film cleaning equipment. We've digitized several thousand films and videos for other archives (Prelinger Archives, Duke Adviews Archive, UPenn Museum of Anthropology & Archeology, NASA, Academic Film Archives of N America) and are eager to spend the time digitizing our own vast film collection.
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If we exceed our goal of $50,000, we'll just keep on digitizing until we run out of funds... because we'll never run out of films!
