Flying a Kite
- Streatham
- 1903
Prolific home movie maker Sid Douglas shares his secrets for the ambitious amateur.
This fun instructional film is one of Sid Douglas' many uncommonly ambitious home movies, which feature music, intertitles and his own brilliant logos. Here he reveals the secrets to creating home movie soundtracks and titles for 16mm films and even includes his own personal announcement for smokers in the audience.
This film is from a collection of almost 100 home movies made by Sid Douglas between 1949 and 1977 featuring family and friends at home and on holiday.
Home movies are intimate catalogues of everyday life: birthdays and holidays, childhoods and neighbourhoods. Each reel is a private scrapbook - memories of cherished people, places and times committed to film. Rarely shared outside the family, home movies are the most intensely personal kind of filmmaking. They are by us, of us, for us. Victorian inventors put filmmaking gear in the hands of wealthy amateurs, but decade by decade, home moviemaking technology has become ever cheaper, simpler and more ubiquitous. Our home movies look much as they always have: in and out of focus, thumbs over the lens, wobbly framing, over-enthusiastic pans. But these flaws can't diminish their warm authenticity. Collectively, the nation's home movies make up a patchwork archive of British social life, of whims and ways, loves loved and lives lived.