Unseen amateur film footage of life in Lincolnshire from the 1930s to the 1970s is going to be made into a film that will become a part of a live cinematic experience at Lincoln’s Performing Arts Centre on Thursday, March 8th.
The film, known as Past Lives, uses live music set to a backdrop of footage from the Media Archive for Central England that has been digitally restored. Although the film is of footage from all over the East Midlands, there is a strong focus on two families from the Lincolnshire area.
Musician and composer Dave Sturt came up with the idea to put this together when he saw an advert for the Media Archive collecting home movies. “When I saw they were collecting home movies, it made me think wouldn’t it be great to put a film together using that footage, write a score and tour it around,” he said.
And that is exactly what he did with the help of visual artist Anthony Hatton who he has previously worked with. “He came to me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing the editing. He presented me with all of this as an idea and said that we had access to this archive. It was very exciting and I couldn’t wait to get on board,” said Hatton.
“It’s been an interesting journey because a lot of this stuff is much like anyone’s collection of photos or home movies. It’s been quite a challenge,” he went on to explain. “On estimate there’s probably 14-15 hours worth of footage and a lot of these clips are 30 seconds long so you have to try to create a story within each collection of people’s home videos.”
One of the main families included is unknown as the footage was found in a loft. “The ones from Mablethorpe are holiday photos but we don’t really know who they are. We’re trying to piece together some sort of history of where the family are from. You can see scenes of Leicester but all the footage was found in Mablethorpe from 1945,” Hatton explained. “The two Lincoln collections are by far the strongest ones that we’ve looked at.”
A workshop will also take place on the day to develop people’s interest with music in film. “We’ve been doing it for a long time and we’ve developed a technique of developing the moods and trying to enhance the images so we’re keen to share that with people,” explained Sturt.
Tickets for the screening of the film start at £5 and are available from the Engine Shed box office or online at the LPAC’s website.
We’re so pleased to be working with Dave Sturt and Tony Wood – they’re helping us share some of this home movie footage with the wider community. This performance gives a unique insight into Midlands life from the 1930s captured on film. They’ve spent hours and hours sifting through these home-movie collections to come up with this not-to-be-missed performance. To find out more about the film collections held at MACE, have a look at http://www.macearchive.org or our blog http://www.macearchive.wordpress.com – If you have any home-movies that you would like to preserve for future generations to enjoy please contact us kogilvie@lincoln.ac.uk
I forgot to mention that the team at the MACE transfer suite – Andrew and Kayla have been working extremely hard in preparing the home-movies and digitising them for this performance – so BIG THANK YOU to them too! Forget the Oscars – its all happening in Lincoln!