In conversation / Documentary First
Phil Maher and filmmaker Christian Taylor follow a family reel into the archive: preserving fragile film, reading the details in a frame, finding a scene, and keeping the historical record distinct from an AI invention.
Phil Maher with host Christian Taylor
Episode 287 8 October 2026
01 / The recording
The full interview, including the footage demonstrations and closing film recommendation.
Times follow the complete YouTube episode, including its opening preview and sponsor segment. The 11 chapter starts are the publisher’s chapters. Audio editions may have different timings.
02 / Before you press play
A reading guide to the interview, with the original recording alongside every chapter.
Stockfilm began with Phil’s grandfather’s films of Chicago family life. Christian asks how that personal discovery became an archive other filmmakers could search and use. The conversation follows the practical work: acquiring reels, cleaning and splicing film, interpreting uncertain dates, and describing a few seconds well enough for someone else to find them.
The interview also makes room for what the footage feels like. Christian describes discovering 1947 family films of Carentan for her documentary work. Phil recalls the smoking, dancing and awkward encounters with a camera that recur across the reels. They finish with backups, family-film donations, and Phil’s documentary recommendation, Dawson City: Frozen Time.
03 / Find your moment
Choose a time to play that part of the conversation. Each chapter also points to the relevant transcript and Stockfilm material.
After a preview of the Dawson City story, Christian introduces Phil. He traces the archive to his grandfather’s Chicago films, his software background, and the decision to make family footage useful to other people. They discuss collecting reels and becoming responsible for the lives recorded on them.
Phil describes damaged reels, repairs and the challenges of amateur cinematography. Christian reacts to the before-and-after examples shown in the video. The conversation returns to the scratches and imperfections that give the original material its character.
Labels, car models, clothing and other clues help narrow a film’s date and location. Phil explains the work between a whole reel and a short searchable clip, including human description, image recognition and the search tools filmmakers use to build a shortlist.
The discussion turns to heat, humidity, shrinking film and the vinegar smell associated with deteriorating acetate. Phil explains the value of retaining the source reel for future capture and for tracing a digital image back to a physical object.
Christian raises the cost of obtaining archival material and the distinction between a source and a footage reseller. This is the speakers’ discussion of sourcing and fees; a particular clip’s rights, restrictions and delivery terms still need their own review.
What can an ordinary home movie add to a documentary? Phil discusses texture and emotional immediacy. Christian describes finding films of Carentan that gave her a view of people and places she had spent years trying to see.
Phil and Christian compare recurring details in old family films: cigarettes in unexpected places, people dancing at home, and the way someone reacts when a camera appears. The chapter includes the sponsor break before the conversation resumes.
Christian asks how Phil reconciles an archive of real footage with his use of AI. He separates finding and licensing an existing image from generating a historical scene, and argues that filmmakers should disclose invented imagery to their audience.
Phil describes on-site, cloud and offline copies. Christian discusses the copies and LTO tapes kept for her own film. Their conversation expands into long-term access, the Long Now idea, and what it might take for information to outlive its current owners and storage systems.
Phil talks about building useful shortlists from a brief and supporting people who have a story to tell. Christian asks about donating or selling family footage, which leads to the archive’s focus on 8mm and Super 8 and the danger of a forgotten box of reels.
Phil recommends Bill Morrison’s documentary and recounts its story of silent-era reels surviving in the Yukon. The recommendation brings the interview back to accidental survival, physical film and the historical images that might otherwise have disappeared. The episode ends with contact details and Christian’s closing.
04 / The published cuts
Publisher releases verified on 16 October 2026. Links open the original publication; alternate platforms for the same cut are grouped together.
Interview excerpt · YouTube Short
A short introduction to the texture and emotion home movies can bring to a documentary. Published 8 October. The publisher’s Episode 287 media folder includes quote graphics and video clips for sharing the interview.
Interview excerpt · YouTube Short
Phil separates the recorded image from the AI tools used to find and license it. Published 9 October.
Companion episode · Christian Taylor
Christian’s follow-up to episode 287 includes Phil’s interview audio and Stockfilm footage. She connects The Velveteen Rabbit with home movies, physical media and the value of keeping footage real. Published 15 October.
Companion excerpt · YouTube Short
A short from Christian’s follow-up episode. It introduces the book passage she uses to reflect on the interview; Phil does not appear in this excerpt. Published 16 October.
These are the releases located on the publishers’ episode pages and YouTube channels as of the verification date. Social reposts may appear later. Send a missing cut or a correction →
05 / Keep following the idea
Source practices, working experiments, research and production resources related to the conversation.
Background
Meet Phil and follow the collection back to the reels that started it.
On screen
Inspect the source and opening-title match for One Day at a Time, a practical example of home footage reaching a new audience.
Preservation
Read the archive’s account of capture, restoration, cataloging and source information.
Watch & compare
See the experiments discussed in the interview, with moving examples and notes on what the comparisons can establish.
Research tool
Get machine-generated research suggestions for a still or clip. Treat its dates and labels as leads to investigate.
Filmmaking
Work through sourcing, documentation and the questions to resolve before a clip enters your edit.
Historical evidence
Review how Stockfilm describes physical origins and the limits of its catalog information.
Production
Check the current licensing route and usage information for the footage you want to use.
Filmmaking
Start with the production questions: scene, source, usage, delivery and the evidence behind a clip.
Find footage
Share the period, place, scene and intended use so Stockfilm can help build a shortlist.
Explore the films
Explore collections of family gatherings, holidays, travel, streets and everyday detail.
Research
Read the dated Visual Memory Index, including catalog totals, geography, gaps and definitions.
AI & archives
Explore the separate use of archival images and metadata for model training and evaluation.
Long-term access
Read Stockfilm’s preservation intentions and how it thinks about access beyond the current generation.
Ask Phil
Describe the reels you have, a preservation question, or a documentary you are researching.
06 / Read the conversation
The entire episode, using the same clock as the video above.
Complete transcript from the episode’s English YouTube captions, including the opening preview, sponsor message and closing. Caption line breaks and repeated speaker labels have been combined into readable passages. Uncertain wording remains in the captions; check the recording before quoting.
146 timestamped passages. Select a time to play that moment; the # beside it links to the passage.
[Phil Maher] They had, like, a community pool, and they filled it up with these old reels. It was worth that little in their minds, right? And they put an ice skating rink over this thing eventually. [Christian Taylor] Oh my gosh. [Phil Maher] And eventually, in the '70s, pieces of film started to come up in the ice skating rink, and the kids would go there and light it on fire and watch the film burn.
It became kind of like everyone knew about it. When they decided to tear this down and put something else there, they started to dig in there, and they found hundreds of these reels that had been frozen in time in the permafrost that had actually survived. And it is an absolute treasure trove of reels from the early 1900s up to the '30s
or so. [Christian Taylor] Talk about cold storage. [Documentary First title card] When you're cutting your film, do you ever reach for something real and a little imperfect over something that's slick? Well, that instinct is what my guest has built his entire company on. Phil Maher founded Stockfilm, the world's largest home movie archive,
with over 200,000 clips from the 1930s through the 1980s. And he keeps every scratch and flaw on purpose, because that's what makes it feel true. Welcome to Documentary First, where we dig into the craft, the business, and the truth of filmmaking. I'm your host, Christian Taylor.
I'm also a documentary filmmaker myself. Phil Maher, welcome to Documentary First. I am incredibly glad you're here. Thank you, Christian. Thanks for your time. I appreciate being on your show. It's really nice to have you. Phil has a computer science degree from Illinois State University. He's a Redbird, and he's also from Illinois, not too far from where I live. He has spent a career as a software engineer,
but now he's in archival work. He got there in 2015, he says, looking for a sense of purpose, wanting to connect with people as opposed to machines. All right, Phil, so you're looking for a sense of purpose. Tell me how that turnabout came in your life.
I was looking at some family reels, one from my grandfather. He grew up in Chicago, and it was really interesting to see my father and his brothers, a big Irish Catholic family in Chicago, and all of the cool memories that they had that I hadn't seen before outside of photographs and stuff. From there I thought, wow, this is really neat to have this silent movie technology that anyone could make.
So I got excited from that and started to capture that footage, and I realized how interesting and unique this was, that it wasn't on the internet yet. There was this whole market that I could tap into of getting things that I thought were really interesting onto the internet, that people could check out and really enjoy, some of the things that a lot of people probably hadn't seen before.
Let me back up for just a second, because where most people start is they go back to their family archives. I know I have these slides that my father kept and also some reels. And they look at that footage and they think, what am I gonna do with those now? I don't even have the machines to play them.
And so we look around, and I found iMemories to make mine digital, and we kind of stop there. So you found yours, and then what did you do? Well, I thought it'd be neat to hold on to these physical reels, along with digitizing them too, in the sense that the physical reel could always be re-digitized down the road
at higher quality, better resolutions, and things like that. So I always thought that it would be neat to hold on to these physical things, because that's the master original copy. Did that come from your computer science or software engineering background?
Or was that just the way your mind worked? Do you like physical things? Or what were you thinking? Well, that's a great question. I spent my career building software, building a lot of things that were virtual, building websites back in 1995 over at ISU working for professors, stuff like that. And I always thought it was neat to be able to build these things,
but I think the idea of having something that is digital was even more exciting. And how do we take things that are physical and make them digital? How do we take things that are very unique in that aspect and digitize them and then be able to bring them onto the internet so the whole world can see?
Well, how did you go from just thinking about it in a personal way, let's say like iMemories does, where we're just going to take people's things, make them digital, put them in a cloud, or give them back to people for them to put in their own storage...
How did you think, I'm gonna do this for people, but I'm gonna make a footage library so that filmmakers can access it? That's just a totally different thought process. How did you go there? Being a software engineer in the early 2000s, late '90s, I got involved with a lot of people that were doing internet marketing.
I got involved in search engine optimization and Google and writing the algorithms for this. So that kind of translated into making websites, and so I made a lot of websites. And as much as I've been a software engineer and internet marketer, I've been an entrepreneur the whole time too.
So I've been creating my own businesses for a very long time. So this just seemed like sort of a natural business. Like, okay, you have these assets. How can we monetize this? How can we put this up on a website to be able to do exactly that? Was there one reel, one family moment that made you think, this is really special and I want to do this for other people?
Yeah, there were some interesting shots in Chicago of my dad and his two brothers that were in a First Communion, and the kids are all dressed up super, super nice, and the nuns have these full kind of garbs on, and it just looked so foreign and wild and interesting that I thought, wow, this is something that I've never seen before,
and I don't think a lot of people have, that could really be lost to history. And I thought, this is really neat. People need to see this kind of stuff. There have been hundreds of moments since then, seeing stuff where I've just been blown away that this existed. How is this not in the history books?
This needs to be told, or this is cool. I always thought, if I think it's cool, maybe other people think it's cool. Where did all these films come from all of a sudden? You started with your own, but then how did you find so many more? Right now you say you have over 200,000 clips.
That's a lot. Where do they come from? It's really snowballed. It took many years of collecting these. I would find them locally. I would reach out to families. Families would reach out to me and want their memories preserved. My wife's father had a pretty good collection of 8mm too that I got into shortly after my grandfather's stuff.
It just really snowballed, and I just kept going and kept going. It was years and years of working on this every single night, just capturing, capturing, capturing. The technology wasn't quite there for figuring out what to do with it, but I just always kept thinking, I'm just gonna keep capturing it, and we'll figure out eventually how to get the metadata on this, how to do everything to get this to the people.
Did it start with you just receiving the physical reels or the physical tape or whatever it is? You would just receive a copy from the person or the families. And I'm assuming they would have to sign over rights to you, or there would be some sort of agreement.
And would you pay for them, or would they just donate them to you? How did that work? You know, it was a combination. Some I pay for. Sometimes people just give me these copies. They just wanted them to be digitized. They wanted their family to be remembered. What's neat about this is that everyone's lost to history except the few elites that make it through history and are remembered.
And I always felt like this was such a cool moment to be a steward to these people's lives and all their trials and tribulations and their vacation trips and their Halloween costumes and their Christmases. I've seen hundreds of Christmases, right?
All different styles of Christmases that people have. And so I thought that was kind of the neat way to dedicate to these people. The reels come in all different ways, shapes, and sizes. A lot of them were in rough condition, where I'd have to retape them and splice them.
They were falling apart. And so that brings up a lot of other questions about the restoration side of it too.
Well, how does that happen? What's interesting is this is all a race of time. Every day that goes by, these physical reels are degrading. They're not getting better. These reels are transforming before your eyes. So it's very important to try to capture them as soon as we can, get them digitized, and kind of save this before it's too late.
And we can't do anything about that. The process would be cleaning these reels down with a light solvent, getting a lot of the dust off of them. The reels were in all different conditions. Some of them were very wavy. I've put videos up on YouTube of the different conditions of some of these reels, so people can see the breadth of what I've had to deal with for a lot of these reels.
I'd like you, if you don't mind, to share some of these with us so that we can share them with our audience. I'd like to do that right now, actually, so that people can see the magic that you can do with these kinds of reels. Absolutely. I think there's a lot of really neat stuff to see for what they come in at and then what we can do to them.
Not that I've done much touching up of them and things like that. But yeah, the raw state of where they're at is interesting. Some of it is how you shoot this stuff too, right? So this is all 8mm and Super 8 film. Like I mentioned, it's silent film.
And it wasn't as easy as pointing your iPhone at something and getting something that's pretty perfect. There were a lot of challenges to actually making this. You had to get the exposure right. You had to get the color right. You had to do all these settings, whether you were indoors, outdoors, what the lighting was like.
It was very challenging to get this stuff right. I've seen so many reels that have been out of focus and have all these other quality issues that people take for granted these days. It was very challenging to make this stuff look very good.
So we're gonna take a break right now, and I'm gonna show people what you're talking about. Great, thanks. All right, everybody, take a look. Oh my gosh. That is amazing!
It goes from completely fuzzy to very clear. That's like magic. Wow. Oh my gosh, I have no idea how you do that.
[laughs] That's incredible, I love it! Aww. That just really makes everybody come to life in a different way.
It makes me want to send you all my home movies. Thank you so much for sharing that before and after footage with us. That's pretty amazing. I hope you guys took a chance to look at that. If you're just listening to this podcast, definitely go on the Documentary First YouTube channel and check that out.
Is there any other magic you work at Stockfilm with footage that people give you? We like to keep it pretty strict to what the original was. Having the scratches, having all the dust particles and what was originally filmed, makes it feel like you're there.
It makes it feel original and real, and that it was difficult to capture stuff in the past, and that this is how it looked. It wasn't the polished high resolution from your iPhone that you get right now, when people were trying to film stuff with this consumer-grade 8mm, Super 8 technology.
That's very cool. Walk me through what happens to a reel from the moment you get it to the moment it's a 4K clip that a filmmaker can license. We get the reels in, and we end up cleaning them up. We use sort of a light solvent on them sometimes to remove some of the dust.
A lot of times, as we're working with them, especially the older films, they'll start to break. So it'll break halfway through the capture. Sometimes it'll break multiple times through even a small three-inch reel. I have a little splicing machine there where you re-splice it together.
That works really well to get the film back into a capturable kind of thing. There are a lot of problems with things jamming up. As film gets older, it shrinks, and so the distance between the two little dots you see on films gets smaller.
So then it has problems with jamming up or not playing at the right speed and all these other issues too. Once we get it captured, then it's a matter of taking a lot of the metadata we can get off of these reels. So a lot of times the reel will be marked pretty well.
It'll say Japan 1974, and it's pretty obvious it's in Japan when you start to see that. Sometimes reels aren't marked so well at all. It'll be grandma's vacation. Then we use a lot of clues to figure out where that's coming from.
Things like technology really help a lot, like a car. So we see a car on there, and we're like, well, it can't be before this car came out. So it has to be 1971 or later, based on the year of that car. So that really helps. Obviously, clothing is a big one too.
The way people dress helps a lot too. We really try to date it as well as we can, taking all the data that we have and making as many educated guesses on where this is from. When we were doing this back in 2015, that was the main process.
Nowadays you can use a lot of the AI tools that will recognize where this is from. It'll help you date it. It'll help you add keywords to it. It'll do a lot of this for you, because there are these very advanced image recognition models out there that can do a lot of this stuff.
But in the early days, we didn't have any of that. So we hired a team. We had a team of people, humans, that were going Okay. through and looking at every single clip. A lot of it was at the still level too. Look at the still and tell me about what is on here, what is not on here.
Use these kinds of words: if it's grainy, what's the focus on it, all sorts of descriptive words on it, as many as we could get, to really get human eyes on this to figure out what it took. Once we get that set up on the metadata side, then it's clipping it out and figuring out, okay, what are the five seconds we want of this?
And then it's more metadata, basically, on that one clip. So we get stuff at the full reel level, and then we start to understand what we want to clip this out at, like a five- or ten-second clip, and then how do we put that up online and things like that.
So that's kind of the basics of how we, you know, digitize these. I'm assuming then, after you make it into these little clips, a big part of it is labeling it or filing it or putting it into some sort of library so that a filmmaker can go in and find what they need, and then figuring out how to license it.
So talk about that part too. We've got a lot of the clips up on stockfilm.com. We've put a lot of effort into making our search functionality very strong on that. So you can type in a brief of what your whole movie's about and get a lot of clips back. Search from keywords.
We also have it so you can put images in, or even a video clip, and select the image you want to find similar clips like that as well. So we really want to make it easy for people to find that sort of information. We've also worked with some of the mainstream stock marketplaces.
We have a pretty big collection over at Pond5 and over at Shutterstock right now. How difficult is it for someone to license the footage? That's such a challenging thing for filmmakers. It's expensive, it takes time. It's just a real part of being an independent documentary filmmaker that's very troublesome.
We've tried to make it as easy as possible. We've got them labeled pretty well for commercial use, editorial, and other distinctions like that. I think that is always gonna be sort of a challenging part, especially when you get into things that have sound or music. As I mentioned, we have 100 percent of the physical master reels of every single thing that we have. We don't have any public domain stuff.
We don't deal with anything that we don't have the actual frame of that we've captured. It's challenging for documentary makers to try to figure out what exactly they want and what licensing comes with each of these clips.
So talk to me about the race against time for these reels. You talk about how they're degrading. Is it a matter of time? Is it a matter of how they're kept? I'm sure it's a matter of both of those, but are there any rules that we need to understand?
Yeah, that's a great question. It's both of those. It's time and how they're kept. The typical problem with the acetate, the safety film, if you will, that these are made of, as opposed to the nitrates, which is, you know, a whole different thing that was before the safety film, is that they really hate heat and humidity.
Those are the two main things you really gotta keep them away from. We have a vault that is kept climate controlled for that. You get this vinegar smell. So it's called vinegar syndrome with these films as they start to degrade.
And once you start to smell that vinegar, it's important to get that away from the other films if you're storing them, because it'll sort of spread, almost like a mold, to the other films. It's challenging. They get warped, they shrink, they dry up.
So you're really going against time to try to figure this out. That's very interesting. Well, after you have digitized the reel, what's the importance of keeping it? Having it is nice if we want to eventually use other technologies to capture it even better. Down the road, who knows what kind of technologies there'll be to be able to do this?
Higher resolutions, HDR kind of stuff that is an even wider range of colors. I understand you can only get so much out of the frame, right? I mean, it's a tiny little 8mm frame. There's only so much information in there. But down the road, who knows?
So I think the beauty of holding on to these is that you have them. And from a provenance standpoint, it works too. We can prove every frame that we have, because we have it. I think having the physical master reels, having that provenance behind it, is something where, regardless of what jurisdiction you're looking at from a legal standpoint, you have at least one leg to stand on.
I know when I've licensed footage, archival footage, the price for that depends on how famous the people in the footage are, or how desired the footage is. Or what drives me insane is when I go to a footage house and I see Signal Corps footage, and people are paying for Signal Corps footage on CriticalPast or something
like that when it's free, and yet they're paying for a license. I feel like that's highway robbery. So if you're doing something and you want something from the Signal Corps, do not get it from CriticalPast or whatever, because that's highway robbery. Is that different in your situation? I mean, like you said, some people have donated it.
These people are not famous. How are you setting your prices? I think what you mentioned is a real supply and demand issue here too. People can get away with charging a lot because it's the Rolling Stones or someone famous or whatever, and it's got a lot of demand for it. We just set sort of a simple pricing that is just one price.
We just stick with a one-price scenario for each clip and just go with it like that. So I think that, you know, splitting the hairs of trying to decide what's popular, what's not, yeah, maybe you could get away with that. Kind of an Uber on-demand pricing kind of scenario of what you would charge people based on how popular it is, how much it's searched for.
I don't know about that. That doesn't sound right to me. And absolutely, charging for public archive.org kind of stuff on your own website just because you can, and you package it up a little bit or something like that, is just ridiculous. That doesn't seem like anything worth doing to me.
There are Signal Corps photos on all of them, on Getty, on CriticalPast. They're charging people for Signal Corps photos that, if they were to spend the time and go to the National Archives or go to the Library of Congress, they can do the research, get them for free, and don't even have to pay for any sort of licenses.
And yet people know it's easier and faster just to go to one of those stock footage houses and pay for them, and they can charge them a licensing fee every five years or whatever like that. It's just stuff that, to me, feels very wrong.
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't sound like anything interesting at all. I mean, you're just repackaging, being a middleman to content that's already out there. You're not restoring any content. You're not preserving anything. It's already there. You're just sort of manipulating it. So yeah, that isn't interesting to me at all.
And taking advantage, I think, of people who are independent filmmakers and trying to just tell a story. I have respect for what you're doing. And it's interesting, we didn't dive much deeper into your searching-for-a-purpose thing as much as I wanted to, but you're touching on it by the way that you're answering this question. Talk to me about how this is answering that call
for you of searching for a deeper purpose than just working with machines. How is what you're doing answering a call to a deeper purpose? Yeah, it's a lot of working with machines to be able to help us do a lot of this work now. And as we've gotten more into this AI era, it's been incredible, the amount of things we can do from an automation standpoint that make things
a lot better and cleaner and faster and stuff like that. So that's super exciting. From a real purpose standpoint, it's back to working with people and remembering that all there is in this world is people. If you can't get along with people, you're probably gonna have a hard time.
And remembering the people that came before us with these films, and again, how difficult they were to make, and how interesting their lives were a lot of times, with a lot of the mundane kinds of things that you wouldn't think about.
And so I think filmmakers find our collection interesting when they want to add that texture. They want to add that emotion. They want to add something that is real without having a narration over it to try to explain to their audience what they're trying to set.
A few seconds of just showing someone a place and time can really just get people into that spot and really create that moment that connects with the audience, I think. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? It's true. I experienced this in the film I'm working on currently, Heroes of Carentan. I had been looking for actual video footage from the town
of Carentan, from really anywhere in that Normandy area, pre-invasion or even during the occupation. I had been trying to find actual video footage from before the GIs arrived, because of course, when the Signal Corps arrived, you had very, very little footage on D-Day because they were a little busy.
There is some, but not a ton. But before that, there just really isn't a lot. And so I had a very difficult time finding anything. And in Heroes of Carentan, my film took a turn this summer when I met a survivor of the battle whose father was an amateur photographer.
And he had tons of pictures from before the invasion of Normandy and then right after the invasion. I found during the summer, when I was working with him, he told me, by the way, you know, my father got a video camera right after the war.
Would you be interested in the video footage? I about fell over. They were all, like, old video footage from 1947 that he had had digitized, all black and white, not only of his family, but the town, the people in the town.
Like, I couldn't believe it. It was like the greatest gift anybody could have given me, to see the things that I had been wanting to see now for 11 years. It was so incredible. I'd been looking for it everywhere, and all of a sudden this guy just puts it in my lap for nothing.
That's incredible. Yeah, what a great moment that is, huh? To see those kinds of mundane moments, to see how people were reacting or just living their lives. I have kind of a good list that I like to go through with people sometimes. And basically it's what people were like back in the '40s or '50s or '60s, and kind of the trends that I've seen over these thousands of reels I've gone
through. And one of them is people smoked everywhere. You forget how much smoking was cool, or just everywhere. They'd be holding a baby, and the guy's having a cigarette over a baby, or drinking whiskey over a baby, or these moments that are pretty cringe at this point. Planes. When I think about everybody smoking on the airplanes when I was a kid, oh my gosh.
Yeah, when we were kids, right? And I think it was even crazier back in the '50s and '60s. Yeah, that's always a fun one. And people used to dance. I've got so much footage of people dancing, and I'm not talking about, like, a wedding dance.
Of course people dance at a wedding or whatever, but, you know, it was just, like, random events, or like Christmas, or any kind of holiday In their homes. In their basements, you know. It was like, we're gonna dance in the basement. Now is when we dance. And they would just be dancing around, and people just danced. They didn't have TVs to gather around or screens to stare at or whatever, and things like that. So yeah, people loved to dance.
It was just so cool to see the interaction of people. People just dancing with old people, young people, kids, whatever. I mean, everyone just danced around, and that was just kind of what you did. That's neat. In this footage that this gentleman shared with me, what I found hilarious was, of course, this was probably the very first video camera that anybody in this French town had ever seen. And so when he was going around filming people,
the way that everyone responded was hilarious. Just to see their reactions to him, the camera, to one another. It was so funny. People, the way that they dressed, the way that they acted. Like you said, about, you know, finding in the church during the communion in your own footage, saving that for posterity's sake is so critical, I think,
because it does teach us who we were. If we were to lose all of that, I think we would lose a part of who we are, who we were. So I really am thankful that you see this as important work. And I do think there is a deep sense of purpose that you are doing something that no one else is doing, which is becoming this repository for our own history.
Thank you. Yeah, I think we're on the same page on that. This stuff is getting lost. These people's lives need to be remembered, and they have some incredible stories to tell. A lot of it's hidden behind stuff. We need to save this stuff. We need to cherish it. It's our history. Let's get people excited about looking at this stuff and show them things that are real. I mean, people are smiling in front of cameras and things like that,
of course. So I'm not here to say that 100 percent of it is candid photos and stuff like that. I mean, people know a camera's pointing at them, kind of thing, right? But there are a lot of really candid moments that you catch that are, you know, outside of scripted acting stuff or a TV show or even a newsreel of the time, right? Where it's more of a professional setting like that.
[Sponsor: Virgil Films] Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at Virgil Films. With over 25 years of distribution experience, Virgil has released such hits as Super Size Me and the Oscar-nominated Restrepo, along with a trove of indie treasures like Forks Over Knives, To Die For, Seven Yards, and Speed is Expensive.
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I like what you said about the concept of how people looked differently at the camera. That was one thing that I noticed when I looked at the footage, was that it's almost like people didn't know how to smile. Like the smile wasn't invented yet in, like, the '30s and '40s.
It's like people would stare at the camera, and they wouldn't know what to do. They weren't doing the big toothy smile that we do now in front of a camera, right? Whenever it comes out. So I just thought that was kind of cool too, kind of the cultural norms of the time and how people learned to smile in front of a camera.
All right. You're very emphatic that what you've got for sale is not AI and that every frame is real. However, you have built a system using AI so that AI tools can search and license your clips instantly. So there's kind of this tension here where you're holding this firm line where AI is concerned, but yet you're not anti-AI, for sure.
And you're cooperating with it. So talk to me about that tension. I think keeping the actual footage 100 percent real and not altering it with AI is super important, because that's the historical record. That's stuff that happened. That's giving trust in the footage and trust in people.
But using AI to be able to create better tools to search this stuff, to find it... And what's really interesting is how the internet's changing, right? The internet was made by people and for people. And over the next few years, we're gonna start to see more of a transition where the internet is for AI.
There's AI talking to AI now. And so how that plays out is that we've built some really cool tools so that AIs can find our footage and then be able to license it directly from us, using different payment channels and things like that too.
It's interesting times. It's best to always lean into these technologies. I've been a technology-forward, bleeding-edge kind of guy my whole life, leaning into all these technologies as they sort of came up. I think that you have to do it.
They're not gonna go away. You can't wish it away. You just have to swim with the fishes in a lot of these scenarios like that. But there's a time and place for everything. I think if you're going to make AI content to recreate some historical battle or whatever you want to do, you've really got to tell the audience that this is AI created.
This is a fictional rendition of what may or may not have happened at that time. It's important to have that and to have truth in your documentaries, in your short films, or whatever you're doing, to really represent who you are and what you are, and not pass off something that is AI created as real.
Yeah, I agree. Now, you wrote a piece on vendor-neutral archives and the Nine PBS cloud lawsuit. So why is physical film safer than the cloud? Obviously, the cloud can go away in a lot of cases, in the sense that you don't really own it.
If a data company blows up, it's gone forever. Having the physical media is important because you have the real backup. And computers can fail. Things can go bad. We've had hard drives fail on us, but luckily we've got everything backed up on site, and then we've got everything in the cloud, and then we've got an off-site location too that has everything on it that's
totally offline. So that three-piece system, having all of your data in three different places, even if you're not doing physical media, is the standard way to do it, right? But the physical media piece adds that additional aspect to it.
I have to say that's kind of where my system is as well with my film, The Girl Who Wore Freedom. The finished film and all of those files are on a hard drive in North Carolina with my editor. They're also with me. They're in the cloud, but I also have them on LTO tapes, because Nice.
that's our cold storage kind of thing. Because it's really important. You can't mess around. And that's what people are starting to realize. I think that's why vinyl is coming back. I've seen CDs come back. I've seen cassette tapes come back. People really are wanting hard copies of things, because they're realizing that when you own a movie from Apple TV or from Amazon, you're owning nothing. You're not owning anything.
You're licensing something, and you don't own it. If you want to keep something, and particularly if you have a film, it should be on LTO tapes. It should be on something hard, because if it's in the cloud, it can go away. Absolutely. And, you know, there are a lot of cool technologies we've been exploring.
We have this concept that we want the footage that we have to be able to outlast us. There's a company that I've followed for a long time called the Long Now Foundation, founded by Danny Hillis. He actually came to a startup I was working for in San Francisco many years ago, and I thought it was an absolutely crazy idea when I was in my 20s, but I started to realize how cool of an idea that is.
His idea is, like, a 10,000-year clock. How do we preserve information in a mountain so that, if anything happens to humanity, eventually someone can find all this information? And so we don't have another Library of Alexandria that gets burned down, that loses a lot of information that the classical era had, that put things into this Dark Ages,
medieval scenario that happened throughout history. From a couple of different technology standpoints, there's the decentralization of technology through technologies like blockchain that allow us to distribute the information all over the place, so there's no central single point of failure that causes data loss and things like that. Danny Hillis's idea was having these physical media kinds of things,
of sketching things super, super tiny into diamonds or rocks or things that would last forever, or at least 10,000 years. And then having the lowest common denominator of technology to be able to look at this, which would be, like, a magnifying glass.
Any advanced civilization would be able to have some sort of way to magnify things, is the theory. You don't need a tape drive. You don't need a hard drive. You don't need any of this physical silicon or chips or anything like that. You just need a magnifying glass to look at it and to be able to read this off of here. It's super cool to think about how you can make things outlast yourself.
Very interesting. All right. It's about time to wrap up. But before we go into our DocuView Déjà Vu segment, is there anything else I haven't asked you that you feel like our filmmakers should know? Anything you're working on, or anything you want us to think about?
A lot of the stuff we're working on is how can we make this content better, in the sense of getting it to the right people at the right time. So we've been doing a lot of things where we're able to create a page on our website that might have 30 clips on it or something, based on just a really small brief about what people are working on,
and getting the highest quality clips of the exact kind of stuff that people would want. So, you know, I think it's really just, how do we create value for people? How do we create an insane amount of value for people that are working on films, that are looking for cool content like this?
And that is, you know, what I kind of think of: how do we put our customers first all the time, or people that are just checking out cool content? And so, you know, I think supporting that kind of aspect is really fun.
I think there are a lot of people that have stories to tell, and young people that don't know how to make a documentary, or people that are just making their first documentary, that we want to be able to support and help, and see how we can really add value to this so they can create that vision in their head and really create something cool.
Well, you sound like a very cool person to work with, and I am very thankful for the work that you are doing, and I think that it's just a wonderful endeavor. And I know that there are gonna be filmmakers who are looking for just the exact thing that you have and are gonna be very thankful that you exist.
So thank you for doing that. If people have footage that they'd like to give you or sell you or have you digitize for them, is that possible? Yeah, absolutely. We get, you know, donations coming in and offers from people that have unique collections or really interesting stuff too. We're open to a lot of different arrangements.
In the future, it's something that makes a lot of sense for people, just to, like, have their family recognized, to have sort of that legacy continue, and not be this box of weird-formatted 8mm that no one knows what to do with, sitting in a closet, that people just end up throwing out, or it just, you know, degrades even more where it can't be captured.
So absolutely. And does it have to fit in between 1930 and 1980? No. I mean, we only specialize in 8mm and Super 8, and that's just the timetable of when that stuff was really used. I mean, I guess there's a bit of a resurgence now of people filming stuff Yeah.
in probably 16mm, or maybe some Super 8 stuff too. And so yeah, absolutely. But yeah, that's the format that I thought was really interesting, the 8mm, Super 8 stuff, because this was a film of the people. This was not anything fancy. It was cheaper to make. It was easy to make.
And so people were able to experiment with it and capture a lot of these moments.
Awesome. All right. Now we are into everyone's favorite segment, DocuView Déjà Vu. Did you bring a documentary that you think our listeners would love? I sure did. I was really excited about this. I thought this was a really cool idea, as I've heard some of your other episodes and what people have had to recommend.
And I've got a really great one for you, so I'm really excited to talk Can't wait. about this. So the movie is called Dawson City: Frozen Time. Okay, never heard of it. So it's a documentary that came out in 2017.
And the concept is, Dawson City is up in the Yukon in Canada. They had a huge gold rush boom at the turn of the century, right around 1900. And the city blew up to 40,000 people and all this stuff.
And it's a really cool kind of gold rush boomtown story. But what's really interesting is that this town was the last town on the road of film, in the way that film got distributed back in the day.
So film, what I mean by film is film reels, like newsreels and information Mm. and movies and all this stuff. So basically, this town would get all these newsreels, all these movies for their little local theater, and it was the last stop as things were moved up.
So things that were in LA three, four years ago would eventually make it all the way around the country and then go up to Dawson City, and that'd be the last stop up there. It was an old boomtown, because they had all this money from the gold to show these movies.
So they had all these hundreds, thousands of reels, and these were old reels. You know, this is the nitrate technology that was before the safety film, which was very dangerous to deal with because it was very flammable. Wow.
It was made out of gun cotton and camphor, is how they made these reels. And so, super dangerous stuff to deal with. Many, many movie houses have been burned down by this stuff. That was the original film stuff like this. This movie is so cool. It's a silent movie, pretty much.
There's not much dialogue in it. It's 99 percent just subtitles up there and showing a lot of these old clips. The director takes you through the chronological history of how this started around the 1890s or so, and people finding gold and building up this city and boomtown up to 40,000 people, and then how it dropped down to 3,000 people and all these things.
But all these films ended up in there, and it was too expensive for the film companies to ship them back down. They just left them up there. That was the last stop on the train. The films end up in Dawson City, and we're not bringing them back, so you deal with it. So a lot of these films got dumped into the river.
That was, like, the main dump of the town. Throw it in the Yukon River No. and float it down. All garbage, all films, a lot of the stuff did. But there was this town library, and this bank that was in charge of these reels put it all in there. And when that filled up, they started to use it for landfill. They had, like, a community pool, and they filled it up with these old reels.
It was worth that little in their minds, right? And they put an ice skating rink over this thing eventually. Oh my gosh. And eventually, in the '70s, pieces of film started to come up in the ice skating rink, and the kids would go there and light it on fire and watch the film burn, kind of thing. It became kind of like everyone knew about it.
Oh yeah, there's this weird thing here, whatever. When they decided to tear this down and put something else there, they started to dig in there, and they found hundreds of these reels that had been frozen in time in the permafrost, like that, that had actually survived.
And it is an absolute treasure trove of reels from the early 1900s up to the '30s or so. Talk about cold storage. Yeah. I mean, it is absolutely incredible, the kind of footage.
I mean, a lot of this stuff had been lost. Hollywood had zero copies of a lot of these movies and Wow. film reels. They found film reels of the famous 1919 Black Sox affair, when the Chicago White Sox were caught cheating and all that stuff.
Wow. And it's things that people hadn't seen before. All sorts of really, really cool stuff that they found in this. So that's the basic story of it. They had to eventually get all these films out of there. All the companies they wanted to move it were like, uh-uh, we're not dealing with it, this is hazardous material.
They eventually got the Canadian government to come in and actually move this stuff into Ottawa, I believe, from Dawson City, which is up in the Yukon, to an actual facility that was able to capture it all and, you know, get all this stuff captured.
And it is like the ultimate treasure trove of that era. So, a really cool documentary about it. Yeah, totally up your alley. Yeah. That sounds great. I'm so happy you introduced me to this, and to our audience. So thank you so much for that.
Thank you for the wonderful work that you do. I know it's going to come in handy for our filmmakers. So thank you very much. Where can everybody find you and find your work? Well, thank you very much, Christian. I had a lot of fun in this talk. You can find me at stockfilm.com, phil@stockfilm.com. Contact me anytime. I'd love to hear what you're working on and see if I could find some cool clips for you and see how we can collaborate on stuff.
That's fantastic. All right, everybody. Well, you have been listening to Documentary First. We really appreciate you listening along. Please, if you get a chance, leave a little review for us wherever you're listening. It really means a lot. And please share this with just one person, just one person who you think may need to hear this today.
So thank you very much for listening to Documentary First, where we believe everybody has a story to tell, and you can be the one to tell it. Bye, everybody.
Another conversation
Phil Maher joins Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan to discuss physical film in the AI era: original training data, reconstructed faces, a fruit-fly simulation, and the distance between an experiment and evidence.
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