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In 1998, Clint Thayer found his old self.
While rummaging through his closet for some old slides, Thayer instead happened upon two 8mm film reels. He didn’t know what they contained but was so eager to find out that he hurried to a local thrift store and bought an old Bell and Howell film projector. It turned out to be the beginning of a three-year mission to bring a moment of his and his family’s past back to life. Filmed between 1959 and 1962, the moving images on the two seven-inch reels captured Thayer, his parents and his brother in Seattle (where he was born) and in Oregon (where his father’s mother lived at the time). Although he had never seen the footage before, he was able to date it by his age in the films — between four and six. When he first watched them, he was struck by the fact that his parents were younger in them than he is now. Though these were, as he says, “typical home movies,” hardly different from the “messy montages” any family might make, Thayer considers them all the more precious because his was never a picture-taking family. It had been on his mind, around the time he came upon the reels, to put something together about the history of his family to give to them as a gift. His serendipitous discovery of these 40-year-old films felt to him like a godsend. Reels in hand, the next question he had to answer was “what can I do with them.” 
That’s where the Mac entered the picture. A fan of Apple technologies since the days of the Apple II, Thayer always appreciated the Mac’s ability “to do exactly what you tell it to do,” as he puts it, and he’s always relied on the Mac to run his business Stereografx, which specializes in creating QuickTime VR images of investment properties. So when it came to finding a cost-efficient, practical, and fun solution to his quest to restore the antiquated reels, he needed to look no further than to his Power Mac G4 equipped with SuperDrive, Mac OS X, and a few applications, most of which came free with his Power Mac.
His initial plan was to turn the film into short QuickTime files, but he chose instead to embark upon a full-blown restoration project—remastering the reels, editing them according to his storyboarded ideas, laying down a soundtrack, then finishing onto DVD. Thayer also had another motive. Always an early adopter of Apple technologies, he took the opportunity to put Mac OS X through its paces. “I made it a point to see if I could start and finish a project in Mac OS X,” he says. Not only was he able to do so, but along the way he discovered two things: 1) that Mac OS X was “a good 25 to 30 percent faster in rendering video than Mac OS 9,” and 2) that Mac OS X never crashed. “Never. It was solid as a rock.” Though he was already versed in Final Cut Pro, he nonetheless made a deliberate choice to use iMovie 2. “I wanted to make sure that I focused on making the video as simple as possible,” he says. For the project he had envisioned, he had no need for the more complex features of Final Cut Pro and wanted to stay as close as possible to the films’ content. The first step: get the content into his Power Mac. To accomplish this, Thayer projected the footage onto a screen, capturing the projected images with a Sony DCR-VX2000 digital video camera. He then fed the video directly into his Power Mac via FireWire. Once all of it had been captured, Thayer separated it into scenes and imported them into iMovie 2. To give these typical home movie scenes some sense of story, he separated and edited them into four separate mini-movies—each featuring one of the four main characters—using storyboards he had created for each of them. |
To preserve the film’s authenticity, he kept the effects to a minimum. “I wasn’t willing to distract the feel of these 8mm movies by going overboard with transitions and effects that normally would not be seen 40 years ago,” he says. He did, however, employ some effects, such as slowing down the pace of certain scenes, fading to sepia tone and black and white, and dissolving—”to add dramatic accent and punctuation.” The original reels lacked sound, so Thayer created a musical soundtrack to play over the moving images using iTools to find royalty-free sound clips right on Apple’s website. Finding the clips he wanted to use, he previewed them in iTunes, and dropped them into iMovie, where he synced them to his movie sequences. He was now ready for the final stage—creating the DVD in iDVD 2. Taking advantage of the program’s ability to make motion menus, he returned to his edited sequences in iMovie and extracted 30-second spots from each mini-movie. He tinted these spots in sepia tone, then moved them into iDVD to use as his menu buttons. Thayer assigned a motion menu to each member of his family, and each received a splash page with a link to his or her movie. 
There was one last thing he wanted to add to the DVD before the final print. No film-restoration project would be complete without a documentary of the making, so to top off his DVD, Thayer put together a brief sequence documenting the process. He pointed his camera at his 17-inch Apple Studio Display and replayed the steps he went through to create the DVD. He then added narration, and the final four-minute segment was added to the DVD as a “bonus” feature.
After burning multiple copies of the DVD on his Power Mac’s SuperDrive, Thayer distributed them to his relatives. The reaction from them, he says, “was more than I could bear.” And they were all equally astounded that it could even be done. The DVD inspired the giving of FireWire-equipped DV cameras as Christmas gifts among his family members. Because of his DVD, they told him, they weren’t going to miss memories of their own. |
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