I got an email from the representative, who told me she could donate 4,000 feet of 35mm film. To which I did one of those Ed Norton things "homina homina homina" steam shot out from my ears. This equated to 42 minutes of footage at a cost of roughly $3,000. "Sure" I said like a prepubescent boy "thank you and where can I deliver my first born?"
The caveat was that it was in two 2,000 feet cans. The magazines I use for my camera are 1000 feet loads. Math geniuses will realize...this will not fit. So now I have film, that needs to be in the dark, broken down to two 1,000 feet loads. At my company there is a dark room used to load archival film. It's about a 4 foot by 4 foot room. The rest are tables. What you need are rewinds, split reels, a measuring stick (to know how much 1,000 feet is), tape, cores for the film, cans and dark bag. Atop all of this...this has to be done completely in the dark.
Not familiar with the light sensitivity of the room, I stood in there for few minutes, until my eyes adjusted, or didn't adjust for the darkness. There was a creeping light from underneath the revolving darkroom door. It was low, and didn't peek into the table I was using for the table. I went over to another film guy and asked to borrow his rewinds. Then had to go dig up c-clamps from engineering. This whole thing was totally "Little Rascals" shit. Put all that shit in a Radio Flyer and putter down to my room.
2,000' of film weighs about 30 pounds. Fucker is heavy. So having clamped down the rewind (which usually is bolted to a clean table) I opened up the can of film...my heart started jumping. Did I turn off phone? Did I turn off iPod. Any light ruins the film (as the sensitivity was about 500 ASA). So far so good. I loaded one end into the take-up side and started turning the reels. Little by little, the take-up side was growing. But the rollers have this really gruesome bump. I expected that I had cinched the film (which could do damage to your pull down claw in camera). But I plowed ahead. Now...here's the thing. I have a tiny idea what a 1,000 ft. should feel like. As I've been scanning film for a while. The max load on any boxed film is about 1,200 ft. Anytime I stop, the film does drag a little on the table. It draws up any lint, dirt or hair that may have been on the table. So I didn't want to stop too much. Also, it could scrape (I found out later on, as I rubbed my fingers across the table, it picked up silver...an element in film, not sure how it effected the negative). When I got to where I thought it was around 1,000 ft. I took the measuring stick, which a friend had lent me and marked off with masking tape where the size cutoff was, and stuck it to where I thought the core was. It was a little short. Or was it. Here's the other thing, had I gone too far, it will not fit inside a 1,000 ft. can. This is all I had in the dark. I decided to play it a little safe and snip it just after a few more turns. I took the split reel off and popped the film off the rewind. Man, did I fumble it around. Being in complete darkness, you do start to think you see light. My mind was going wonky. Anyway, I slipped the negative into a black bag and into a can. It fit! I took the other film and put it back into it's respective can. I hugged the cans (I'm serious). Mine, mine, mine.
I did this about four more times..sans the hugging (since I also had one 400 ft. magazine), and came up with 4,000 ft. of film that will fit into my magazines now. It was surely a task. But to get something for free, you have to earn it. This movie means so much more to me because of it.
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