How to Buy 16 mm Film

Video Transcript

Hi! I am Grady Johnson with Karma Train Productions and I am going to talk a little about 16 mm film. Today, I am representing Expert Village.com. 16 mm films come in a lot of variety; you got the little ones like this and you got more medium sized ones and then there is the larger, full length reel. These are what the reels were originally like when they first had them in the movie theater and this was kind of cool about them. You’ll see when you open one of these up; it looks just like what you always saw as a regular movie reel, you get the actual film that comes off it, it has the actual little perforations in it as well. One thing you always want to be sure when you pickup one of these films is that it has a nice long leader on it. Okay, you can pickup little spliced tools at different camera stores to be able to add leader if you need to if it’s short. If you find a lot of these films don’t have the leader on it, then you want to go ahead and add that. Okay, it’s real simple to do. It’s just like a little piece of tape that you put together when you put the two pieces of film together. You probably won’t have to do anymore kind of editing like that, I don’t want you to think it’s real technical and you know that’s only if you want to do that; you don’t necessarily have to. We’ll talk a little bit more about that when we get into storage and care of film. However, the main thing you want to do is to figure out where to buy these and you’re going to want to go online first and find that is your greatest resource. There are a lot of different auction sites, some that specialize in nothing but collecting these kinds of films. You’re going to find television shows if that’s your interest, you’ll find sporting things, old instructional films. Some of these are a lot of fun. I use them in my field to kind of put them together and a lot of things are created on-line for you. You may have an old vintage television series, like an old Efrem Zimbalist series or something like that from the 60s that you like. You will find it’s generally going to be somewhere on 16 mm film. A lot of old book stores that you find, vintage stores that are a lot of fun to go shop in, you’ll find these 16 mm films in there as well. So there are a lot of places you can look at. A couple of things you want to be sure of not only the leader, you also want to be sure of the way it looks, so you want to kind of pull this thing out a little bit, take a look at the actual film itself and see if the color, you wanted to be sure it’s kind of brown, hold it up to the light. If it’s real pinkish looking that means it was an older film that is wearing out and it wasn’t stored very well. Most of the time you want someone to tell you this was stored in a nice cool place. That usually means that it’s in pretty good shape. There are all kinds of films, I like old cartoons. You’ll find a lot of old cartoons out there. You’ll find a lot of stuff they don’t show on television anymore that is censored, will still be on 16 mm film. So a lot of things that you may not be able to find anywhere else, you will find on 16 mm and this is a lot a fun digging into it. There are a lot of auctions on-line that you can look at and whatever works for you, I mean, use your own imagination, pretty soon when you start to look for it and your eyes coming out for it, you’re going to find them all over the place.

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