About Stockfilm
How a Box of Family Reels Became Stockfilm
Stockfilm started in 2015, when our founder found his grandfather's home-movie reels in a box. A decade later it is a small team that preserves, restores, and licenses authentic 8mm and Super 8 footage, and it is built to keep doing that for the next hundred years.
Founder's Story: The Beginning
Stockfilm founder Phil Maher discovered old family reels his grandfather had filmed decades earlier across Chicago, road trips, and family milestones. Those reels were fragile, irreplaceable, and full of moments that could easily have been lost.
Saving those reels became the start of Stockfilm: scan original film carefully, restore it, and put it in front of people who need real footage instead of a recreation.
What began as one family's preservation project turned into a wider job: rescue archival footage before it degrades and get it to filmmakers, documentary teams, agencies, and brands.
Where We Are Now
Today Stockfilm runs as a working footage business. The focus is narrow: license vintage footage, keep the metadata accurate, make the rights clean and easy to clear, and distribute across the major marketplaces.
- Adding coverage by decade, location, and theme.
- Making clips easier to find through better tagging and search.
- Restoring more reels before they degrade past saving.
- Building repeat relationships with production and editorial buyers.
Here for the Next Hundred Years
Families shot these reels to be remembered. That only works if the archive holding them outlasts news cycles, platform pivots, and its own founders. Stockfilm has operated continuously since 2015, and we run it on a hundred-year horizon: clip pages keep their URLs, the physical reels stay preserved after scanning, and the catalog stays free to search, so future generations can see how the past actually looked in the footage ordinary people shot themselves.
The full commitment, and the practical decisions behind it, are written down on our permanence page.
Learn More
- How We Preserve — Our methodology for sourcing, scanning, restoring, and cataloging vintage film.
- Case Studies — How production teams use our archival footage in real projects.
- Careers — Join our team and help build the future of archival footage.
- Licensing Guide — Step-by-step guide to licensing vintage footage from our archive.
- AI Training Data — Explore our dataset for AI and machine learning applications.
- Partner Program — Earn commission referring filmmakers, editors, and agencies to direct-license footage. Apply to join.