york

1994 – Greece, York, Christmas concert

Posted by meraki

This is password protected—password 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 😉

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.

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? 🙂

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.

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 🙂

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.

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).