Uncommon Ephemera's Mark O'Brien Discusses Filmstrip Preservation on Willow's Vintage Homestead Postcast

Preservation began with a rescued shelf of school library filmstrips and a car trunk in 1999

JOHNSON CITY, NY - March 4, 2026 - Mark O'Brien, founder of the educational filmstrip preservation initiative Uncommon Ephemera, appeared on episode 31 of Willow's Vintage Homestead, a podcast hosted by author and filmmaker Willow Polson, to discuss the origins and technical challenges of preserving America's forgotten educational film format.

In the interview, O'Brien described how the project began by accident in 1999, when a librarian at a school district at which he worked was clearing a wall of shelves full of filmstrips headed for the dumpster. "What if I back my car up to this door over here and you just pretend that my car is the dumpster?" O'Brien recalled asking her. She agreed, and he spent that afternoon loading the discarded collection into his car.

At the time, O'Brien preserved only the filmstrips' audio as MP3s, and later lost the original cassettes, records, and the film itself over a series of moves. He didn't return to the material until 2018, during a long recovery from thyroid cancer treatment that left him searching for something to occupy his time. Looking into whether anyone had picked up where he'd left off in the intervening years, he found no one had.

O'Brien also discussed why faithful presentation matters as much as the scan itself. Amateur restorations that auto-crop scans and hard-cut between frames on the audio cue tone, he explained, miss the projected, human-paced feel that anyone who watched filmstrips on original equipment would remember. "You run the risk of being the only historical source left of what it was like to watch a film," he said, "and then we're watching it through your lens. When you get it wrong, the history book is written wrong."

The conversation also covered Eastmancolor, the budget film stock Kodak developed in the 1950s for mass commercial duplication, including filmstrips. Its dye layers fade unevenly, O'Brien explained, with the cyan and yellow layers fading fastest and leaving behind the reddish color cast common to deteriorating filmstrips, a process that can be partially corrected in editing but never fully reversed. O'Brien further explained that Eastmancolor eventually fails chemically, causing the faded images to be completely lost.

About Uncommon Ephemera

Uncommon Ephemera is a media preservation initiative focused on saving American educational and industrial filmstrips. All preserved materials are made freely available through the Internet Archive. For more information, visit uncommonephemera.org.

Links:

• Watch the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAHBIbS8CoE
• Internet Archive collections: https://uncommonephemera.org/collections

Media Contact:

Mark O'Brien
[email protected]