Oh well, looks like I’ve just missed this year’s one, but “HOME MOVIE DAY” seems like a good idea. A day to get together and show old home movies, and absorb the slices of life they represent.
What hit me hardest is the bit that says:
Your home movies may be easier to watch if you transfer them to videotape or DVDs, but the original films will actually last MUCH longer than any new media.
I know I’ve just lost some of my digital footage, and it occurred to me that there ought to be some sort of archival service which will transfer digitally produced/edited video onto stable, human-viewable, analogue filmstock. The equivalent, I guess, to printing an e-book on “acid free paper” for long-term storage.
If the promise of recording the day-to-day details of our lives for posterity is to make any sense at all, then the stuff we are recording now needs to still be there when posterity comes looking.