FAQ

You can participate in this project by sending your old home movie for digitization and donating a copy of at least 5 min of the digitized footage to the archives at York University.

You can also participate by helping us spread the world! Please share news of this project with others who might be interested in preserving their old home movies.

Yes, check out our Project Resources page. 

Home Made Visible seeks to digitize old home movies for families to keep and to preserve as part of our collective histories through the archives.

For the full project description click here.

The use of Indigenous in this context refers to Status and Non-Status First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples.

Visible minority is the most widely understood and official term, as set by Statistics Canada, to identify people “other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.”

This projects acknowledges the limits of this term, but uses it to identify people belong to the many racial and cultural minority groups in Canada which include (but are not limited to) Black Africans, Black West Indians, Black Canadians and Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, South Asian (Bangladeshi, East Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan), West Asian and Arab (e.g., Afghani, Armenian, Egyptian, Iranian, Iraqi, Jordanian,Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Turk), Southeast Asian (e.g., Burmese, Cambodian/Kampuchean, Laotian, Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian), Latin American, Pacific Islanders and others.

This term includes people of mixed race and heritage, including those whose mixed race and heritage includes either white or indigenous backgrounds. Finally, for the purposes of this project, this term extends to people who may pass as white, but come from families and communities that are visible minorities.

Canadian, for the purposes of this project, does not refer to a person’s formal citizenship status, but refers to anyone who is living in Canada and calls it home.

We are looking for home movies from the 20th century that are made in Canada. We accept all formats, including 16mm, 8mm, VHS, Mini DV Tape, Hi-8, video and digitized formats.

1. Contact us.
2. The Project Team will contact you and walk you through submitting your footage and what permission forms to sign.
3. Once everything is signed, we will send you a FedEx code to use to mail the analog footage for digitization OR give you access to a private online portal to upload your digitized footage.
4. After you review your footage we will set up for a brief interview to help create a write up to go along with your footage.
5. You decide what footage you would like to preserve and where. You can keep you artifact OR donate it to York University Libraries. Your digital footage will be entered into the public archive at York University Libraries and if you like can be exhibited on our website and/or as part of our tour.

Digitized footage will be sent back to through a private online portal. The old tapes and reels will be mailed back upon request. If you do not wish to have the tapes and reels returned, they can be placed, with your permission, at the York Universities Libraries’ archives for cool storage.

Submitted footage will enter the public archive at York University Libraries. With your consent, excerpts of the home movies will also be made available online on the Home Made Visible website and public exhibits, along with other home movies, commissioned works and writings.

How many movies you can submit depends on how many we have already received. Generally, we will ask people to limit their submissions to up to 5 hours of home movie footage.

Thank you for your interest. Our call out for submissions closed November 20th, 2017. Selected filmmakers can be found on our Artists page.

Select materials are now available for streaming through our Home Movies page.

Please contact York University Libraries for access to the collection.