1944-5 India and Army Air Corps Gun Camera footage

About

Film my father shot while stationed in India during WWII

In 1990 I got him to record a narration

These were originally individual reels of 16mm film, I didn't do the video edit. How and why the gun camera stuff got edited in as it did not sure.

My father taught High School Economics and International Relations for a number of years and then at first substitute, and then as a guest speaker here at Key West HS after retiring. Where I am sure this shown many times.

Somewhere along the way someone edited them together. Unfortunately projected many many times that faded the not great early color to begin with film and led to the patches of severe scratches.

When I was working as a TV Broadcast engineer I transferred it to video as well as many reels of other family films, on the TV stations film chain. Which was no easy task as silent 16mm is 16fps and sound is 24fps... so first transferred it to 1" video which could do clean variable speed play back... and brought it back to 16fps for dub to VHS... wish there had been a higher resolution consumer format in 1989...

Though the film was not ultra sharp to begin with as it was shot with a 1920's Bell & Howell (when the name meant something) wind up motor camera with a fixed focus lens. Which I still have... maybe find a museum to donate it to as it's nearing 100 years old. I did one find an old ad for it... in the 1920's it cost near $200 dollars which was a lot of money back then...when beer was a nickel. Much like early 80's video camera and recorders being $1000.... before such thing as a camcorder, and even early those a few years later were not cheap.

Camera has an interesting history itself... was actually stolen and buried once during a vacation. Evidently the not to smart thieves (usually the case) hit the shutter and it started click whirring away and they thought it was a bomb or something. Forget the story of how they were caught.. but it was dug up and recovered... originally it was my grandfather's who died young (when mom 14) and father inherited it along with the films her father shot, when they married.

After I did all that, I asked dad to do a narration for it and the 1939-40 NYC World fair (also now here http://archive.org/details/193940NYCWorldFair ) that only he had any idea of what it all was, and dubbed it onto the video...was hard to sync and he was often speaking after shots... so things get off a few seconds here and there... did a lot of pausing to try and keep it reasonably in sync.

You may note at the end of his narration he says I don't know how many will ever see this I hope A LOT... for a man that never gave up a manual typewriter for email...now more than he probably ever imagined.

If you liked this there is also 1939-40 NYC World Fair films you see a few frames of at the start of this. https://archive.org/details/193940NYCWorldFair

I split them up to keep files sizes reasonable and the subjects being so divergent, but they were from a single reel of home films tape.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

G. Ross McKee Jr

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