Wayback Wednesday Goes to the Movies
By Vance Polton
Since the Oscars were just last weekend I thought it was appropriate to talk about "Iowa Fisheries on Film". As early as 1915 and probably even a little earlier than that people have been recording the work of fisheries conservation in Iowa on motion picture film. For the curious, those early films were taken using hand-cranked cameras that did not record sound. Even the projectors that would have shown these films to the audiences were hand-cranked until the mid-1920's, about the same time as motion pictures began having sound (1927).
Even when Jim Sherman started to make films in the 1940's and 50's, the movie camera he used to record our work was a Cine-Kodak Special motion picture camera that used a "clockwork" motor that was wound by hand to operate. The Cine-Kodak Special Jim used had a film chamber (think cassette) that held 100 ft of film which amounted to about 4 minutes of runtime during which you had to wind the camera's motor 3 times (38 turns of the hand crank) to make it operate. It was also not capable of recording sound so if Jim wanted sound he had to record it separately.
So grab some popcorn and let's get started. "Iowa Fisheries on Film"
Sorry no actual film footage today, while I do have plenty digitized, attaching some of it to this email would make some people with slow internet connections very unhappy.
