Slice of life

Autumn in York, 1985

Posted by meraki

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 πŸ™‚ 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.

Fresh out of the oven! November 1978

Posted by meraki

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? πŸ™‚

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.

Greece 1968

Posted by meraki

This video was like a treasure trove – the scenes in Athens are fantastic, and the parts in Chalkidiki are so charming. Some color correction on this will be needed in the future, but for now I’ve uploaded it exactly as the original was.

Greece (Athens, Chalkidiki) 1968 from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.

Beautiful scenes from Greece (Athens and Chalkidiki) in 1968. There is no audio.

The first 15 minutes include the plane landing in Athens and views around the city at that time. The Acropolis looks positively deserted of tourists! And I'm envious that you were able to walk around the Parthenon back then (I don't think you can do that now, I certainly wasn't able to).

16 minutes in the scenery changes to Chalkidiki for beautiful bucolic scenes in the farm country. Note how the women working in the fields still dressed back then.

York to JFK Airport, 1968

Posted by meraki

I love this video – it was definitely a bit of ephemera, I don’t think it was meant to be a big deal, but I love seeing everyone packing up the car and getting ready for a big trip. Plus the shots out the car window and of even mundane things like the JFK parking lot — back then, no big deal — are really neat to look at these years later.

America – York, PA and JFK airport – 1968 from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.

Some great ephemera on this home video of America in the late 60s. (I believe this is 1968)

The family packing up the car in York, PA and driving to JFK airport in NYC. I loved the cars on the highway — there wasn't a lot of traffic!

You can tell Pappou did a lot of the filming here because there are soooooo many jump cuts. Who knew he was so influenced by Godard?

What’s also amazing to me (as a Millenial, I guess) is how nicely everyone was dressed for a long trip! I can’t even imagine a trans-Atlantic flight now in a nice dress and Mary Jane shoes.

Summer 1985 (SOOC)

Posted by meraki

This one is one of two films we have that I’m actually in, as far as I know. Looks like this was in Camp Hill in 1985, out in the Kontanis backyard, mainly under the gazebo. I’m guessing summertime?

Lots of the family members are in this one.

Summer 1985 – SOOC from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.

No audio on this one of course.

I apologize for the huge gap in uploads here, as some of you know my condo flooded a few weeks ago. Thankfully nothing got damaged (VERY thankfully!) but the clean-up on my place has taken up all my free time and then some. Thankfully that’s all finishing up now, so fingers crossed I’ll be able to dive back in to this project with my previous gusto πŸ™‚

SOOC: Tree climbers

Posted by meraki

Three of my cousins and my pappou George climbing a tree in my grandparents’ backyard in their former house in York, PA.

Tree climbers – some color work – highly compressed from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.

This one’s so bad SOOC that I super-compressed the video so it doesn’t eat up my upload quota!

Might not be much I can do for this, but I’m going to try. When I’ve tried to do some corrections, the film quality was so degraded that a lot of the color information is simply gone. Fingers crossed I can fix this up a little more.

What I love about this clip is that it was randomly spliced onto the end of my parents’ wedding reel. According to my mom, pappou George really liked to splice, even if it didn’t make a whole lot of contextual sense.

For me, this is like a little easter egg of footage at the end of my parents’ wedding footage. Completely unexpected but really awesome, especially since these three kids in the film now are grown and have kids of their own (or on the way).