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Uncommon Ephemera, the only known organization dedicated to saving filmstrips, will host the 2025 Uncommon Ephemera Filmstrip Festival, an online event to showcase restored filmstrips and highlight the urgent need to preserve this overlooked educational medium. The festival will stream live on YouTube, Twitch, and other platforms the weekend of May 16, 2025.
Filmstrips, distinct from 16mm motion picture films, are 35mm still-image slideshows on a continuous strip of film typically synchronized with audio recordings on vinyl records or cassette tapes. Used in classrooms, industry, and businesses from the 1940s to the early 1990s, they covered academic subjects like science and sex education, as well as industrial topics such as sales training. These artifacts, produced equally by small companies or major names like Disney and Hanna-Barbera, are starting to decompose, and Uncommon Ephemera's Mark O'Brien is working alone to digitize and restore them.
"Communities passionate about nostalgia, analog media, and lost formats thrive online, yet I was stunned to find no one saving filmstrips," says O'Brien. "Grants are tied to physical archives requiring public access, and I barely have the financial support to do this from a home office, much less to buy a building and hire staff. There's an old-guard, old-money bias in preservation, but those same academics in ivory towers with easy access to money have chosen to ignore this entire format, despite their cultural and historical value, campy charm, and quirky pop-art. If Mystery Science Theater 3000 proved anything, it's that these relics not only deserve to be saved, but they would have a massive and passionate audience."
The Uncommon Ephemera Filmstrip Festival will feature O'Brien's restored filmstrips spanning six decades, information about his restoration process, insights into the films' historical context, and opportunities for audience questions. The event will also address the financial constraints limiting preservation efforts. O'Brien's saved filmstrips are freely available on The Internet Archive, ensuring access for educators, researchers, and the public.
The event is free to attend, with donations encouraged to help sustain the preservation efforts. Contributions can be made in advance at https://uncommonephemera.org/donate.
Filmstrips were a 20th century media format with a sequence of still images on 35mm film with an optional soundtrack. They have been almost completely ignored by archivists.
Because they were printed on long strips of 35mm film, there is no reasonably-priced equipment that will take an entire filmstrip and preserve it in a high-quality digital form. Machines do exist, but they are built for Hollywood and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Most filmstrips from the 1950s-1980s were printed on Eastmancolor film stock, which is notorious for uneven dye fading, leaving most a strong shade of red. Worse, the binder chemical that holds the dye layers in place tends to break down over time, and many Eastmancolor filmstrips will simply be unrecoverable in a few more years.
Most other film stocks did not behave like this, and filmstrips printed on film stocks like Eastman LPP can still be found in excellent shape, but the vast majority were printed on Eastmancolor, and will soon be lost forever.
Because filmstrips are printed on 35mm film, there are only bad options in the consumer space for preserving them. In order to save them, I have two choices: Buy a refigerator-sized machine made for Hollywood costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, or cutting the filmstrips into pieces that will fit in a flatbed scanner designed to scan photo negatives. Because I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am forced to do the latter.
It doesn't bother me to do this, as there's literally no other way they would ever be saved if I didn't. The entire film preservation community has had decades to save filmstrips and they didn't, leaving those of us who care about preserving the format to do what we need to do to save the format.
If a filmstrip still has its soundtrack, it can be assembled into a video that simulates how someone would have viewed it at the time. Only having access to a flatbed scanner means scans need to be cropped and straightened by hand. The filmstrip soundtrack on record or cassette needs to be digitized on good equipment. If a filmstrip was printed on Eastmancolor, the filmstrip needs to be color-corrected, though some Eastmancolor is so faded it's not possible to get the true colors back. Then the soundtrack and frame scans are assembled in a video editor, human-like transitions are added, and it can be uploaded to the Internet Archive and YouTube.
Everything I preserve is uploaded to the Internet Archive with select restorations also uploaded to YouTube. On the Internet Archive, I also upload the original scans and audio captures I make in lossless or uncompressed formats. Since many of the filmstrips I am preserving are at the end of their life and chemically breaking down, there may not be a chance to ever scan them again, so making a high-quality scan of these filmstrips as soon as possible and making it available.
I can put in the time and the effort to scan and save all these filmstrips, and restore the ones with soundtracks, but it's going to take many more years. During this time, I'll also be fighting to raise awareness about the plight of filmstrip media. You can help by:
Thank you for helping me save these forgotten parts of history!