Bergeron wedding: May 25, 1973

Posted by meraki

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).


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Bergeron wedding

Theia Anna & Theio Harry’s wedding 1968

Posted by meraki

Here it is – the video from Theia Anna and Theio Harry’s wedding! It’s mostly a lot of dancing at the reception, but the procession before the wedding is on there too. As noted below, the first 2 minutes are not very good (under exposed!) but after that it gets a lot better. I loved seeing the dancing at the end (very 60s looking, some of it :))

Theohari & Anna wedding from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.

Theia Anna and Theio Harry's lovely wedding in Greece. The first 2 minutes are very grainy and underexposed (I did what little I could to fix it, but not much I can do). Don't worry, the quality gets much better 2 minutes in.
The film starts at the procession through the village, for some reason excludes the ceremony, and then has lots and LOTS of footage of the dancing afterwards.

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.

Pascha 1968

Posted by meraki

This video was spliced right in the middle of a film of the family in Greece (oh, Pappou and his splicing!)
I am going to guess this was in 1968, though it’d be great to find out for sure — anyone remember when this was?

Pascha (Greek Easter) 1968 from Meraki Mou on Vimeo.

This clip was right smack-dab in the middle of the film of the family in Greece. Before this clip is everyone wandering around Athens and the village, and immediately after is Theia Anna's wedding. I'm pretty sure this video was a bit back in time, not sure if it's 1968 but it is likely around then.

It's definitely Greek Easter though. Those red candles and red eggs are a giveaway!

It’s possible that after the Easter meal the video takes place somewhere else (or is spliced in from another event), but I am not sure. I could use a second opinion ๐Ÿ™‚

There was actually audio on these and the next few files — not the original audio from the events of course, but added-in music by the film-to-VHS company in York that did the first transfer. It’s pretty hokey stuff, like random jazz meant to give these videos an “old-timey” feel. I didn’t think anyone would be all that attached to the music so I removed it from this video and all the rest.

Also I just bought a Vimeo Plus account, which means I can upload more videos more quickly and you can view them in high definition. As always, all these videos are downloadable — you can save them to your computer! Drop me a line if you need help doing this.

Theio Harry’s chanting – 4 audio files

Posted by meraki

Theia Anna was kind to let me borrow some cassettes of Theio Harry chanting in church. I just finished digitizing these cassettes tapes and have the audio available for everyone in a few different formats.

There were 2 cassette tapes, I’ve digitized each side separately. You can listen to the audio on this page and download the files directly if you’d like to save them for yourself. Each file is about 65MB (encoded at 192 kbps) and about 45 minutes long.

Tape 1: Father Costa, Theoharis Papayannis chanting- August 25, 1996

Side A: http://merakiedits.com/audio/orthros-liturgy-tape-1-side-a.mp3 (direct download)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B: http://merakiedits.com/audio/orthros-liturgy-tape-1-side-b.mp3 (direct download)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Tape 2: Theoharis Papayannis chanting (not sure when this was recorded or where)

Side A: http://merakiedits.com/audio/tape2-side1.mp3 (direct download)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B: http://merakiedits.com/audio/tape2-side2.mp3 (direct download)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I will upload the OGG-Vorbis versions of each file shortly, they are about 150MB each as they are lossless file formats, so it will take a little while to upload them all.

Please note that aside from some minor volume adjustments I have not modified the audio whatsoever. Since these are from a cassette, the audio starts and stops abruptly at the beginning and end of each file where the tape runs out. (I could have added fades but that seemed totally unnecessary.)

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 ๐Ÿ™‚

What audio formats do you want?

Posted by meraki

[poll id=”1″]

I’ll soon be converting some audio cassettes to digital and plan on making each recording into at least 2 versions. One will be MP3, which is compressed and easily playable, and another will be a loss-less format, which will be much higher quality. This way people can download and save the audio if they want.

I’d like to know if anyone has a preference or specific request for audio formats. Please vote in the poll and/or post in the comments if so.

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).