Road To Lillooet

A quick but short video entry here - while we wait for more classic movie films to be processed down at the local drug store on Elm Street.

I had not personally seen this particular bit of VHS tape in many years. It only briefly captures the horror and anguish of driving the 70 miles of unpaved roadway that runs from Lillooet to Gun Lake. Actually, this is just a small portion of the returning part of that trek, but might give the viewer an idea of what the other 69 miles are like.

The 'forever captured' afternoon we see here, hails from August in the summer of 1984 when Sandy and I drove up to Gun Lake to blow a week's vacation with Kim and Doug at her grandfather's cabin.

Unfit For Public Consumption

We've reached the end of another 400' roll of super 8 film from the distant 1970s and there's precious little meat left to chew on at this stage. I dunno - have we already seen most of the bits and pieces from the attached video in our previous 100 blog postings? It's possible; I've long ago stopped checking.

After this entry, we might have to begin running some of the secondary footage that wasn't deemed quite good enough for public consumption during our first year of operation. Perhaps, if you've been with us from the very start, you've already come to the conclusion that all the crummy stuff was being uploaded FIRST - and the better films had yet to make their initial appearance on this blog. Well, you'd be wrong on that assumption, Einstein.

A few scenes within this video were altered or exchanged on 21/2/09.

Expect The Unexpected

I always expect to find the unexpected when compiling these short video chapters from my long forgotten youth of the 1970s. I'm always hoping to find a tiny snippet or two that will provide visual proof of something I've completely forgotten about; completely lost the memory cells for. A discovery of that unscripted style HAS actually happened on previous occasions with these blog film reels, but unfortunately it didn't happen anywhere in the selection we have on our plate today.

The scenes here with Sandy and me strolling around the downtown core, were shot in 1984 with the full intention of being mailed across the pond to Jonny in England as some sorta documentary gift. If anything has surprised me during today's video, it's the discovery that these city scenes are still in my possession and that they never managed to make the trip to Cornwall as was planned. I can only hope that a promise to the man was never made in the first place; telling him that they were coming when they obviously never would be.

It's always nice to flash back and see the cosy old neighborhood in its heyday, or the niece and nephew as little kids again or my Blazer buddies enjoying the prime of their lives with, as yet, no knowledge of the brick wall they would soon be running into at full speed in the not too distant future.

Darkness And Regret

You may THINK that you've seen some of these film clips in previous posts over the last 12 months on this blogger stage, but in most cases, you'd be horribly mistaken. What we have here is another episode of 'clean out the reject drawer' in which all the unused or redundant or uninteresting clips can finally get their public airing before having to live out the rest of their lives in the darkness and regret of the storage room. And since that's pretty much what we've been shooting for all along with this blog nonsense (darkness and regret) our trolley bus is totally on schedule and paying its own fare.

I plan to revisit a few of the captured moments seen on this video in more depth at a later time. For instance, the masterpiece I shot of George and Don driving their 'Great White Tongue' down to Kerrisdale Cameras in a long series of four frames per second, contains a treasure trove of single images that zip across the screen much too fast for the human eye to fully appreciate. A sample of that goldmine is included in the image of George that headlines this post. That jitterbug sequence, and others like it, is really no less than a photo album containing hundreds of vintage pictures of our little corner of Blazerville and the people that populated it back in the mid 70s.