January 18, 2007
Dear Foster cousins and extended family members:
Greetings from those of us who have been volunteering on the C.H.W. Foster film project. We wanted to bring you up to date.
Originally, when we started this project, our idea was to produce some kind of single, centralized film from the Foster home movie footage shot from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. That is still a viable idea, but during 2006 we also discovered that we ALSO wanted to help various family branches produce their own customized mini-films starring 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 newer philosophy is to conserve the old materials AND share them through 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. We have loaned those hard drives to a couple of Foster cousins, Edie Farwell (Vermont/California) and Jonathan Foster (California), who expressed interest. They will copy the files to their own hard drives and, at some point in the future, on their own timetables, create their own mini-movies starring their closest Foster relatives (in this case, their fathers). They can add contemporary interview footage and combine it with the old silent footage, add voiceovers, or add music – whatever they want to do. But the important thing is, they have the old footage now. It’s not being “hoarded” in a conventional archive. It’s being shared.
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.
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.
We hope to have more announcements for you in the near future and wish you well.
Derry Allen (Washington, DC)
Adam Foster (Washington, DC)
Reg Foster (Marion, MA)
Nancy Morris (Etna, NH)
Roger Warner (Ipswich, MA)