Video put together for Dr. Domingo’s birthday celebration (running time: 8:09)

Technical note: all the news article headlines were from 6/21 — The Doc’s birthday.

Sometime last year when we were working on the Pomona Library’s “California Of The Past” Digital Storytelling Project, one of the stories we featured was that of “The Great Christmas Train Wreck of 1899” as narrated by J. Carson Bowen. The narration was taken from an expansive set of reel-to-reel tapes of oral histories recorded in the 1960′s. The images were mostly photos we have in our Special Collections room except for a small bit of CG animation I created in Blender.

Because of the computer-generated bit, I affectionately started calling the film “The Traininator” and created a mock-trailer for the blockbuster movie about this runaway train barreling through the quiet town of Pomona, California. Then the movie “Unstoppable” comes out this year while “The Traininator” languishes in obscurity.

This is the would-be trailer for The Greatest. Christmas Train Wreck Movie. Ever.

From the Groomsman-cam. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of footage from my camera but this one seemed interesting.

A few weeks ago, we ran into a few 16mm films of the Padua Players down in the depths of the Pomona Library. In order to help preserve the information/images, we used a film projector and captured the results onto a digital camcorder. After a day of filming, downloading, and compressing them to .mov files on a computer, we found that the videos had already been transferred to VHS. Thus the following week, we hooked up a VCR to the video-capture box and recorded directly on a mac. Not only was that method more convenient, it provided better quality video as well.

That said, I decided to rescue the lesser-quality cam footage and share the entire digitization experience.

…as only an older brother can deliver.

The following preview has been approved for all audiences…