I recently came across a home movie (Super-8, color / sound on a 400' reel) of a subject of interest. I decided to go ahead and purchase it (arriving today.) Have any members come across family home movies for sale and purchased them? I'm a aviation fan and the film coming in contains footage of air racing from 1980. Not sure what the quality will be like but due to the rarity of the event I felt it was worth taking a risk on.

No, but I have considered a couple. One filmed in Oslo (where I live) and of old steam trains.

Being a film shot by an amateur the quality may be a bit uneven but I figure if there's enough footage of the subject at hand,the risk is worth it. I didn't pay much for the reel ($15.00) so if it's a bust, no big loss in my opinion.

Not for the reason of owning them, but got in collections bought. I have not much need for them, but can not throw film unless it is unusable (warped)

For me if the content (in this case aviation related) is desired it's worth the risk.

Only once...

I ended up with some amateur footage accidentally. I bought a 400ft 16mm film titled Historic Britain, castles etc: it turned out to be amateur footage, with a few people on there that were known to the photographer. Then I bought two aviation films, one was of the Hendon Air Display, 1929. I was very pleased to discover this was not a commercial print, as it will be the only copy. I bought a 100ft reel that had been shot by a Vicar in 1935 or 36, and it included footage of the air display at Speke , now John Lennon airport. Part of the display was Alan Cobham's Flying Circus. The display attracted a crowd of 10,000 people, the largest outside of London.

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Here is the one home movie that I have bought off of eBay. It came with the original film box that had a date of November 1959 (to be processed by). The address of the film's original owner was on the back, so I'm assuming the box was used to ship the film in to/from the processing lab. It made me want to do a little investigation online to see if the house was still there and indeed it is! I'm not so sure if this is where the pool in the film was located, but it's where the processed film would have been mailed to. On Realtor.com, there is one photo of the front of the house, a 1,515 square ft. home built in 1955. It looks like it has been maintained all these years and the house changed hands last in the 1990's.


The film was labelled 'Blanton's Pool Party' and contained images of young and old having fun in and around the pool. I am amazed by the wonderful color left in this film. It would be neat to locate some of the people that were in these recorded memories but I am sure by now that most, if not all of the adults in the film have passed on.

Kodachrome seems to simply last forever Timothy. There is not one single trace of any fade on any of my Home Movies to date! Magical stuff is Kodachrome!!

posted twice the same response for some reason???

I do find this very sad, these unknown folk, doing their thing to us an unknown watcher, how tragic. These films belong with their families, not us. I remember Tony of Bucks Films, telling me how folk came in with films to be transferred to video, and leaving the
original film behind as unwanted, he was as shocked as I was when he told me, a film stock that will still have colour a hundred years from now, is universal, it can be shown anywhere in this world, just chucked like so much rubbish, people are spoiled and unappreciative
thinking that todays techno is forever, how short sighted, how very sad. Just as an after thought, I had a job where there had been a house fire, I was sent in to do remedial works, photos were laying about, I gathered them up, even the damaged ones, luckily I knew the
family and passed them on, its their history, not ours. I suppose ebay might be a saviour of sorts in that these films are kept from destruction.

The copy of Historic Britain that I bought is Kodachrome from 1937.

If only our Super-8 features and digests had (and maintained) color like Kodachrome does. Tim,my late Father's old Standard 8 movies (he started shooting film in 1956 to 1971) still have nice color like your screenshots. That's very neat about your research on the home address and that the house is still there. As Hugh pointed out,it is sad that so many of these films wound up being binned after being transferred to other mediums. I can only imagine how horrid (if even still playable) some of the film to VHS transfers look now.

I wish that our family had films like these (of my parents, grandparents and so forth). Some videotapes were made (and I transferred those to discs a few years ago myself), but I have nothing of my paternal grandparents but a few photos. There were absolutely no film cameras or projectors owned by any of my family, but I have always had a fascination for them. The seller of this film only had the one reel for sale, so there's no telling whose possession it's been in over the years. It did, however, come from a seller in Texas.

My preferred film was Perutz, I also shot on Agfachrome. The colours on these all appear to have held up well. I wasn't keen on the original Ektachrome 160.