The following guest post from film archivist Mark O’Brien is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

In 1999, I was working in information technology at a school district in rural upstate New York, and dreaming of writing angst-ridden, sample-laden music that might help people understand what it felt like to be me. Autism was not well-understood when I was a child, and I was simply left to try to pretend to be normal. One day I walked into the school’s library and saw an entire wall of shelves being emptied. The district was getting rid of old educational multimedia, most of it filmstrips.

Filmstrips were like slideshows, but on a continuous strip of 35mm film, published equally by independent publishers and juggernauts like Coronet, Jam Handy, Disney, and Hanna-Barbera. By the 1960s, most had soundtracks on record or cassette. A beep or bell sound on the recording told the projectionist to move the filmstrip forward one frame. Today, most people incorrectly call 16mm motion pictures “filmstrips,” but they were in fact a separate and distinct thing all of their own.

Instinctively aware that the records and tapes probably contained cheesy, anachronistic material that could also be manipulated in the music I dreamed of making, and also aware that no one else had probably thought to dig through filmstrip soundtracks, I quickly pled my case to the librarian, and she let me take them all home.

I gleefully digitized all the records and tapes over the next few months. At the time, I had a good turntable and cassette deck, a professional audio interface, and experience working with audio. I got a couple of filmstrip projectors too, and hosted a few get-togethers with friends where we laughed at the filmstrips’ authoritarian, buttoned-down nature, the out-of-time fashions and styles, and the failed attempts to try to seem cool to a high-school-aged audience. We pretended we were on Mystery Science Theater 3000, chastising the images on the screen. While everyone else was simply throwing filmstrips away, I had discovered a cultural artifact and viewing experience that aligned perfectly with the subversive zeitgeist of the 90s.

Sample film from the Uncommon Ephemera collection at Internet Archive

While I began to dream of some way to digitize the film and, perhaps, put it together with the audio in a pre-YouTube world (“Maybe I could learn Macromedia Flash!” I thought. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.) — I had neither the money nor the smarts to get it done. I hung onto the filmstrips for a few years and, feeling like a failure, finally threw them and the soundtracks away. Due to my ignorance and storage space constraints, the only thing left of those soundtracks are MP3s. These two atrocities – saving only MP3s instead of lossless audio, and throwing away the filmstrips, most of which I still haven’t found again – haunt me to this day.

Fast forward to 2018. After a long bout of fatigue, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I got the offending gland removed, but the fatigue did not abate. Still in rural upstate New York, I only had access to doctors who would say “your bloodwork looks correct, it’s not my problem.” I had no choice but to learn to live with the fatigue and, paradoxically, scramble to find something that could financially sustain me and accommodate my medically required non-traditional schedule.

I forget now, but something made me look into filmstrips again. Surely, between 1999 and 2019 someone had taken up this cause and I wouldn’t need to, right? In fact, just the opposite was true, and it shocked me: no one was saving them. I bought some on eBay and started to experiment.

I also continued to do research — wait, what do you mean 35mm film scanners cost $700,000?! No wonder these things aren’t getting saved! Still, I wondered if there was some way I could do it on equipment I could afford. I was hopeful maybe I could scan them somehow, put them together in a video editor and post them to YouTube and people would enjoy them, and maybe they would support me through Patreon.

Learn more about Mark O’Brien & Uncommon Ephemera
– Uncommon Ephemera website: https://uncommonephemera.org/
– Internet Archive collection: https://archive.org/details/uncommonephemera

But I quickly realized this wasn’t preservation as much as it was triage. Most filmstrips were printed on Eastmancolor, a film stock which is now notorious for self-destruction. First, the cyan and yellow dyes fade, destroying fine detail and leaving the film an intense shade of red. Then, the binder chemical that holds the dye layers in place begins to disintegrate. Once this happens, the dye layers move and smear, destroying the images on the film. The speed at which this happens is dependent on the environmental conditions in which the film was stored. All Eastmancolor film is now red, most of it can no longer be properly color-corrected, a lot of it is in the beginning stages of binder breakdown (called “vinegar syndrome”), and some filmstrips are already physically lost.

Realizing this wasn’t traditional preservation, and researching the methods by which a small number of others had saved a small number of filmstrips, I came to an uncomfortable decision: the only way to get this done with limited economic resources was to use a flatbed scanner that accepted 35mm negatives, and carefully cut them to fit in the scanner’s film negative adapter. I’ve heard this makes “real” preservationists wince, but they had thirty-plus years to digitize the format on the right equipment. If I do not do this work now, these filmstrips, containing K-12 and university educational media, business and industry training films, presentations for religious organizations, and sales films used by insurance companies, Amway, and other organizations would be completely unviewable in less than a decade.

With my obsessive-compulsiveness on full alert, I began learning how to make high-quality scans, and developed a process in a video editor to make the filmstrips behave like they did when viewed on a projector, with their characteristic visible movement of the film between frames. In 2019 I was still a long way from being a good preservationist; some of the filmstrips I digitized at the beginning were still discarded after I got a good scan. Today, I try to keep everything just in case.

I left YouTube for a while in 2022, when Scholastic, one of the largest children’s book publishers on earth, tried to get my channel deleted. Turns out they bought the assets of a defunct filmstrip publisher whose work I was trying to save. So not only had no one preserved these things, but a corporation hoarding bankruptcy assets now threatened the very point of preservation in the first place: making history available for viewing. That’s when I moved my primary home to the Internet Archive, who have been unequivocally wonderful to me.

“Sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place.”

Mark O’Brien, film archivist

Without filmstrips, our memory of American culture in the 20th century would be severely lacking. They provide historical perspective, cultural context, and reflect the successes and failures of our education system. They are original sources, unaffected by the space constraints and biases of historians and content aggregators. And they’re fun, full of anachronism, awkward photography, non-theistic proselytizing, and so much incredible hand-drawn artwork that runs the gamut from gorgeous to insane to psychedelic to “my three-year-old drew this.” I feel they could be equally attractive to historians and meme makers, squares and cool kids, the religious and nonreligious, fans of education and fans of comedy.

For this essay, I was asked to explain why preserving filmstrips is important. And that’s why I’ve told you this story; sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place. As an independent and self-taught archivist, it’s disheartening when I have an interaction with people who admonish me about my credentials (I don’t have any), my affiliation with a university (I flunked out of one once, does that count?), or my methods, borne out of necessity and urgency. It’s heartbreaking when people on a “lost media” subreddit flame me for saving “lost media no one cares about,” or when universities and institutions dismiss what I do while simultaneously beating their chests about the important work they’re doing. And it’s ignorantly classist when someone suggests I just wait until I have $700,000 to scan them “correctly.” (I assure you, there will be no Eastmancolor film left on the planet in preservable condition by the time that money comes around.)

While I continue to improve my processes, I am regularly disappointed at how much of what I do isn’t actual preservation: it turns out to be mostly raising awareness, setting boundaries, scraping for a dozen YouTube views here and there, and shouting into the void that is social media — none of which I am particularly good at, having what is effectively a social learning disability which challenges my ability to be an effective communicator.

However, pressing questions remain: how do I convince people it’s not only important, but urgent to save whatever of this format is still out there? How do I get help instead of gatekeeping from other archives and institutions? How do I compensate preservationists who help for their time? How do I compete for attention and financial support on platforms that thrive on viral, rage-bait, and us-versus-them content? Can one person, working as hard as he can on something important but not popular, ever do enough, in an age of content creators with a hundred employees and millions of followers, to even be seen?

I hope these words reach some people, but I’m acutely aware of just how many thousands it takes to truly spread the word about something in the modern age. I have more than 2,000 filmstrips left to scan, most from a few generous donors, and I estimate that’s about ten years of full-time work. Most are printed on Eastmancolor. It will probably take longer to save them than they have left. I am saving as many as I can, but I fear unless I find a way to more effectively communicate the urgency of it all, I won’t be able to save them all. I think it would be shameful if those things got in the way of saving filmstrips, a critical and cool part of our past.

About the author

Mark O’Brien lives in upstate New York with his wife, who you can follow on X at @MrsEphemera, and their cat Charlie, who they got at a yard sale.