Homemade Movies

The home movie has existed since technology provided an easy-to-use consumer format of moving image capture. Stories illustrated through the amateur photographer document a unique viewpoint of the every-day-person of their time.

The Al Larvick Conservation Fund, officially founded in 2014, supports the conservation and public accessibility of analog home movies, amateur cinema and community recordings of yesteryear. The nonprofit does this by grant-giving. Grants support the digitization of analog and obsolete media. See list of grantees here.

The Fund further collaborates with partner organizations to bring live screening and educational events to the pubic and records oral histories in order to contextualize the films and videos.

Through lab sponsorship and fundraising, the Al Larvick Conservation Fund has supported the conservation and digital capture of many collections of films and videotape by way of two grant opportunities. Grantees retain ownership of their original and newly digitized media. With the cooperation of each grant recipient, the Fund catalogues each new digital file within its database and makes the motion pictures available on Internet Archive.

The Larvick films in tandem with the fund’s grant recipient collections are utilized creatively to exhibit regional histories with community member stories, as well as reveal broader themes that reach beyond the personal. These events elicit memory sharing, the discovery of commonalities and a celebration of differences, while illuminating the cultural importance of the home movie. To learn more visit allarvickfund.org

The Al Larvick Family Film Collection is privately held, consisting of around 65 reels of 8mm film recorded by Al Larvick, his wife, Ethel Larvick, and his brother-in-law Elmer Larson, as well as other family and community members. The recordings took place from approximately 1953 to 1980. These home movies are sometimes shown in tandem with the Fund’s grantees and partner organization collections