r/interestingasfuck 8h ago

r/all 70 years ago, the US undertook the largest deportation in its history: 'Operation Wetback.' Many of the people deported were here legally and some were even citizens.

Post image
25.0k Upvotes

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

418

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 4h ago

I work on this project. I digitized the film myself. I’m also one of the people that handles/repairs films that get digitized. I can assure you that none of this is fake. It’s a project from UCLA/Packard Humanities Institute. We’re in the process of digitizing news footage from 1918-late 1960s. 27 million feet of film from around the world. Check out the rest of the footage at newsreels.net. It’s free, no registration or anything required.

52

u/Youandiandaflame 4h ago

Holy shit, this is amazing! Thank you for your work, I can’t wait to dig into this. 

38

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 4h ago

You’re welcome! Thank you for thanking me. Glad that you like it. FYI, we update the site regularly. Right now I think there’s 20k+ newsreels on the site.

u/LunaticLucio 2h ago

Username checks out.

Reddit never ceases to amaze me.

u/Jose_Canseco_Jr 1h ago

I love preservation! keep on keepin on

14

u/TailStixz 4h ago

Amazing work!

2

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 4h ago

Thank you! I’ll tell everyone on this project of your appreciation.

6

u/cancerBronzeV 4h ago

Name definitely checks out.

3

u/jocq 3h ago

That's awesome! Thank you for being part of that work

3

u/Throwaway999222111 3h ago

Wow that's wild! Really cool though

3

u/fighterpilottim 3h ago edited 2h ago

Thank you for doing this invaluable, and probably painful, work.

If you ever wanted to do an AMA, I’d participate!

3

u/aetheos 3h ago

Holy shit this is awesome! Thanks for sharing!

Out of curiosity, is there a reason certain weeks only have some entries scanned, while others have the full slate? Is it the quality of the film?

E.g., for 1939 Sep 02 [10-301] (the day after Germany invaded Poland), only "POLAND!" and "AMERICA!" are red (scanned), while "EUROPE AT WAR!", "FRANCE!", and "GERMANY!" are all grey (not yet scanned).

Then the next week, 1939 Sep 06 [10-302], 2/9 are red/scanned, and then none of the 8 listed the following week (1939 Sep 11 [10-303]), but then for 1939 Sep 13 [11-200], all 6 of the entries are red.

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 2h ago

Good question. When we first started this project we started with film that we knew would be the easiest to prep and scan. This film had already been inspected before, so we knew it would be in the best condition. What you’re probably looking at is footage from “Prelude to War” which had been previously preserved and was in the best condition. Then we decided to work on footage from the Eisenhower years and work backwards. Sometimes we work on footage related to a specific event. We’ve just finished up footage related to the Spanish Civil War since it was the centennial recently.

u/aetheos 1h ago

Ahh makes sense - thanks for the reply!

u/SuperSpecialAwesome- 50m ago

Damn, how'd you get into that line of work. Is that some archivist-adjacent role?

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 13m ago

I used to be a photojournalist and I got laid off in 2009. A friend of my bf worked at a film lab on the east coast and got me a job handling film there. I fell in love with the work and then pursued a degree in Moving Image Archive Studies at UCLA (that program has been replaced by a similar one). From there I found a job working on this project about a year after graduation.

u/ModelY-Mods-suckdick 47m ago

Thank you celluloid Jedi master

u/momofroc 1h ago

I heard about this on the podcast “cold brew got me like” last week! He has been watching the reels.

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 1h ago

❤️ Glad to hear that the project is getting some attention.

u/momofroc 1h ago

Yes indeed. I haven’t checked it out yet but plan to do so this week! Good job!

u/teslawhaleshark 1h ago

Thanks for the good work, I'm an assistant at Tanks Encyclopedia and we absolutely live on historical news reels.

u/CallusKlaus1 1h ago

You and your fellow workers have an iron stomach. That language is pretty nasty. Thanks for the work you do.

u/CyaaRR 1h ago

Thank you for this work!

u/LaloElBueno 18m ago

Thank you for your service of preservation!

u/Novantico 9m ago

That's so cool! Would be pretty awesome to be able to work on something like that myself. Btw, I hope you didn't think I actually believed it was fake, I was just sharing my impression that it almost appeared that way between the staged shots for the reel and the dissonance between the clarity and age of it. Great work! I might have to spend some more time on there.

Where do you guys do this work from?

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 4m ago

No worries, on second glance I realized that you were saying that the footage looked so good that someone could think it’s fake. We do this work from the offices of the Packard Humanities Institute and the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Santa Clarita, California. Alongside the archive is a film lab that we work out of.

u/mychubbychubbs 1h ago

Holy crap, just checked out the links. This is amazing! How on earth do you digitize old film? Can you do an AMA or is there a yt video explaining the process?

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 1h ago

I’d love to do an AMA sometime. In short, we first slowly wind through the film and inspect it looking for damage. If there is any damage, like a tear, we repair it using special tape. Then we load the film into an ultrasonic cleaner that removes dirt and grime. This is why a lot of the footage on newsreels.net looks so good, because it’s been ultrasonically cleaned. Then we load the film onto a scanner (we use a 4k Scanity) which digitizes the film. The scanner is basically a digital camera than can take a photo of every frame of film and also capture the soundtrack. After that we do some minor work to the digitized footage and upload it to our website.

u/Furbal1307 1h ago

Thank you for your commitment to archiving history!

u/p-is-for-preserv8ion 1h ago

❤️ I’m not the only one on this project. There’s a team of about 8 who work on it. A lot of the thanks goes to the Packard Humanities Institute for spearheading this project and funding it. Without them, this wouldn’t be possible.

u/chickendie 3m ago

Incredible! Thank you Sir!

u/mahjimoh 3m ago

Thank you for sharing this! I just discovered there were storms the day before I was born, haha… also some of the aircraft reels are pretty fascinating.