Past Events:

October 7th - Basics of Film and Video Preservation
Co-presented by the Midwest Media Archives Alliance, the Chicago Film Archives and the Film Studies Center of the University of Chicago.

An introduction to basic concepts and practices in film and video preservation, this class will be useful to archivists, students, filmmakers and others who want to know more about preserving, accessing and managing collections or have a general interest in the practice of moving image archiving.  The morning session
will focus on film and the afternoon will cover all things video.

The morning session will be an overview of film gauges, stocks, handling, storage issues, types of damage and decay, and tips for setting preservation priorities. 

The afternoon session will cover basics of videotapes formats, magnetic recording, preservation risks, migration/reformatting, working with vendors, storage issues and more.  We will provide resources in both sessions for participants to further investigate these and other topics independently.

Instructor Bios

Carolyn Faber, co-founder and Executive Director of the Midwest Media Archives Alliance, is a filmmaker and a moving image archivist with 10 years experience in the field. She has worked with collections at National Geographic, the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Chicago Filmmakers.  She is an advisory board member of the Chicago Film Archives and consultant to the Media Burn Independent Video archive. For 6 years she was the archivist at the WPA Film Library where she managed over 50 film and video collections.

Jeff Martin is a graduate of New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. His work at NYU included projects at the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and NYU's Bobst Library Downtown Arts Collection.  He is the content coordinator for a new online preservation resource co-developed by Independent Media Arts Alliance and Electronic Arts Intermix. He has worked as an archival moving image researcher, archivist, writer, and television producer; his writings have been published in The Moving Image, The Journal of the National Arts Museum of Taiwan, and the forthcoming anthology Watching Teen TV.