title: The Barrington Project

I built an automated 16mm film scanner to archive my family’s collection of home movies.

The collection belonged to my paternal grandmother, Susan Barnett (nee Brandt), and dates to her childhood in the ‘40s and early ‘50s on her family’s farm in Barrington, Illinois. Most of it hasn't been watched in over fifty years.

The film is very old. It's absurdly brittle, often damaged, and surprisingly expensive to professionally archive. For decades it sat in her shed withering away in the elements. As a lover of history and an obsessive preservationist I always felt that I needed to do something about it.

In the summer of 2019 I had the idea that I should pony up and pay to have the collection professionally archived as a Christmas present for my dad. The quotes I received from labs I trusted were somewhere in the ballpark of ‘new compact SUV’ so that definitely wasn’t an option.

Instead, I ended up trying to build my own scanner and scan the collection by myself. It would eventually become an all-absorbing, desperate Ahab-esque quest that for a brief time would suck all the joy and free time from my life, but hey look I did it:

It's really two stories: one about the technical challenges behind building a film scanner from a 1940’s movie projector when you have no idea what you're doing, and another about the historical context of the film, how it came into my possession, and what it depicts. I suspect people interested in the latter probably don't care too much about the former, and maybe vice versa.

With the goal of communicating these stories to everybody - I’ve split this blog post in two:

• A brief and sappy historical half that sheds some light on the film and my grandmother.

• An absurdly long technical half which walks through the design, implementation, and usage of the scanner.

You can read both if you’d like, or just one, or neither. Or if none of that sounds appealing, you can go straight to the playlist here.

Cheers.