We took a family vacation to New Mexico (mama, baba, D, me, E) in 2014. A few months before we spent time together around Christmas to plan out where we would go. I recorded that conversation, about an hour long, and here it is:
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This is password protectedโpassword is my first name, lowercase letters.
Most of this video is pretty boring (Transfiguration church Christmas concert from 1994 is the vast majority of it, thankfully it’s at the end). The beginning has a lot of family footage from Katerini (baba’s family) and York (mom’s family) that year. Lots of preteen awkwardness from me as well. Yeah, that’s partly why it’s password protected, to protect my fragile ego ๐
I think we must have just gotten the camcorder in 1993 or 1994 or so, as I notice we had a lot of video from 1994 – 1996 but not a lot afterwards.
Selfishly I loved this video a lot, it had a lot of baba, yiayia and pappou with me and D when we were super little and it’s all very lovely. Especially baba bouncing me on his shoulders, walking D home from school (? not sure how that worked, we weren’t living there were we?), and playing with leaves in the park with Yiayia.
Also, lots of footage of just me, which I wasn’t expecting! It was kind of awesome, thanks for that mom ๐ I only wish we saw more of you in front of the camera, but I’m glad for the few moments where we did see you.
Here’s the link: http://costinabios.blogspot.com/
Dad answers questions, mom types out the answers.
It’s always a little odd editing video for something you know you attended but can’t remember. It’s me in this video, gettin’ baptized an’ all, but I was way too little to remember it. Very weird cognitive dissonance thinking it’s some other little scamp all grumpy and crying in the font, though I recognize her as me.
I got a lot of nice words from family about the last video I uploaded. I think we all loved seeing so much happiness in such a beautiful moment in life in that last one. It was great seeing Yiayia knitting and her and Pappou smiling with the grandbabies, back in the Juniper Street house no less. I have at least one more film reel converted to VHS already on my computer that I can upload soon, I hope to get to that upon my return from a business trip this week. And I think I may be running up against the end of film reels on VHS that my parents have at hand. (It may be time to start asking around other family members for theirs, if they’d like to contribute…)
On less happy news, it seems the key piece of hardware that I’ve been using to convert VHS tapes to digital has gone all primadonna and refuses to work. I have no idea why. I’ve had it about a year now and have used it maybe half a dozen times in total. I’m a little afraid to think that it might already have bit the dust after such little use, but all other measures I’ve taken to troubleshoot it are pointing to that conclusion. As it’s not a cheap device to replace, I really hope I can get it running again, though I’m mainly just annoyed that something I’ve barely used has already started getting very temperamental. ๐ I’ve done nothing to change my set up or anything, so this is completely out of the blue and very, very aggravating.
Babies don’t get much fresher than this. In the film clips below, a certain someboDy (ahem) is coming home with mom from the hospital in York. Lots of great family moments in this one in Yiayia and Pappou’s Juniper Street house.
Pretty sure the other baby in this one is Timi, right? ๐
I’m really glad this film got converted to VHS when it did – in the scenes outdoors it’s REALLY clear that the cellulose was degrading very badly. You’ll notice lots of snowflake-shaped patterning on the image at the beginning of the reel.
It’s a shame that these are very noticeably visible, but then again, it’s not too distracting most of the time. (Plus I’m relatively sure I can fix this, at least frame by frame.) I’d rather have slightly distorted images than none at all!
And counting blessings where I can, again, the degradation is only at the beginning of the reel. The rest of it is just fine, very thankfully.
About 5 years ago, my father received a lifetime achievement award at his company for many, many years of innovation, leadership, and hard work. Understandably he’s been quite proud of this achievement and we were all tickled to see him honored in a company video. Earlier this year my mother contacted his company’s marketing department and they were kind enough to send us a copy of his award ceremony’s video – even though it was from 2007, thankfully they still had it on file!
I promised Baba I’d include his video as part of my family film archive project. So without further ado, here it is.
Chriss emailed me about how to download the videos and audio files on this site, so I put together a brief video explainer (which you don’t have to download, don’t worry!)
How to download video or audio on MerakiEdits.com from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.
A short tutorial on how you can download the video and audio on MerakiEdits.com so you can save the files to your own computer.
I should also note that downloading the video or audio files may take a while as they are BIG FILES. So you might want to get a cup of coffee while they download ๐
And now for a ‘guest video’ if you like: I’ve digitized the wedding tape of Eric’s parents, Mary Ann and Grant Bergeron. Since I’ve been digitizing videos of my family’s important events, I thought it only natural to do the same for Eric’s family too!
Bergeron wedding from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.
I always enjoy looking at footage from the 70s, especially the early 70s, because good lord — the lapels! What’s not to love? They were all in style at the time, of course. (And yes I’m well aware that 30+ years from now when people look at pictures from my wedding, they will probably say the same things…)
I did some light optimization and editing on this, mainly on the footage inside the church. I was able to amp up the overall exposure and brighten the midtones so we can see a little more of what’s going on, but as with all film-to-VHS-to-digital, unfortunately a lot of the original “data” is lost. There’s not a lot you can do, but I did what I could. I think the first few minutes are significantly improved from the original! (I’ll post a comparison later.)
Eric’s parents were married on May 25, 1973 at St. Jerome Roman Catholic church in New Britain, CT. The reception was in Bristol at Georgette’s house (Grant’s sister).
