December 30, 2006
Dear Foster cousins and extended family members:
Greetings! Those of us who have been volunteering on the C.H.W. Foster film project wanted to get another message out before the end of 2006 …
This year, we discovered that we wanted to produce some kind of film from the Foster home movie footage shot from the late 1920s to the early 1950s … but that we ALSO wanted to help various family branches produce their own customized mini-films featuring the people nearest and dearest to their hearts.
This has put us – to our great surprise – on the cutting edge of the archival preservation movement. If the old philosophy was to centralize collections of old papers, photographs, and even movies to help conserve them, the new philosophy is to conserve old materials but also share them through sending out high-quality digital copies.
You might recall that last fall we sent, to anybody who asked, DVD copies of Hilda Chase Foster’s home movies, divided up into numbered scenes with an identification key. Well, that was just the first step.
As a second step, we’ve purchased a couple of hard drives and have loaded them with the newly-digitized film clips. As an experiment, we have sent those hard drives on loan to a couple of Foster cousins, Edie Farwell (Vermont) and Jonathan Foster (California) who expressed interest. Ideally, Edie and Jon would shoot contemporary interview footage and combine it with the old silent footage to make short customized films for their own family branches, but whatever they might produce (either now or in the future) is a bonus. The important thing is, we’re started sharing the footage, making it freely available and accessible, rather than “hoarding” it as conventional archives do. And that is our core philosophy and mission.
Those hard drives will be available for sending out again sometime toward the end of January. If somebody in your branch of the family knows how to edit home videos on a computer, even on a novice level, and this is something you’re interested in, contact us and put your name of the list.
As a third step, we’re also working to upgrade our website, www.chwfoster.com. Adam Foster (Washington, D.C.) is in charge of that effort, which will make sharing this precious film footage and other family information even easier.
Right now, those upgrade attempts are not apparent to users, as Adam is working on the site’s infrastructure. (In techno-speak, he’s converting the pages to a CSS or Cascading Style Sheet standard, which will make future redesigns much easier). Once that is done, you will be able to download individual film clips from the site, as well as gain access to some rather extraordinary family tree information that Adam’s late father (also nicknamed Adam) created some years ago. We hope to announce details of this in the first quarter of 2007. And we also want to ask your opinions on the project’s future directions.
In the meanwhile, Happy New Year to all from the Foster Family Film Project!