In Which I Thought I Broke Something But Then It Was Fine So It's Not Really An Interesting Story

Happy Holidays, friends.

It's officially the month of Christmas, which means finals are soon, which means break time soon :^)

I'm really grateful that I've had this experience this summer, but this semester has been really hard and I honestly cannot wait to go home. I still have to write 2...pretty long papers between now and when I can finally go back to Massachusetts but I am still so excited that I have less than 3 weeks left.

Speaking of my paper, today I went to the Library of Congress' Motion Picture Reading Room to watch a couple of the movies I'm writing about in my final paper. It was super cool! I wish I had brought my phone to take some pictures. I assumed I would be watching a DVD copy of the films or something, but it was the actual 35- and 16-mm reels! The 35-mm reels were super short, like less than 20 minutes each, so to watch one 1.5 hours film I had to get the technician to change the reel, like, 6 times. I felt kinda bad calling her so many times but she was really nice, and when the reel started to squeak, she was like, "let me rub some silicon on it." I wish I knew how to set up the film reels and stuff I think I would love doing that.

It kinda looked like this! Except there were only two reels fed into the machine, not 4 like there is here. This is called a flatbed editor, but I think the one I used was a little simpler because it was only for playback, not editing obviously

Anyway I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. If I could just be a film technician and project film for a living, that's what I would want to do.

At one point the 16-mm reel I was watching, like, broke, too? Broke is maybe not the right word but basically there were all these weird splices in the film and the technician said she thought maybe they were put there because the reel was for playing the movie on TV, so these splices would be where they cut to commercial. But while the film was playing through one of these splices, the tape holding the film together just came apart so the reel started going out of the thing it was threaded through and I was like, "oh man I just broke this film reel from 1933." But the technician was like, "nah, you're Gucci, dude" (not verbatim) and just put the reel back together all slick-like. Ah, it was the coolest thing ever! I want to learn how to be a film technician too!

Anyway speaking of the cinema, this weekend, after an uneventful Saturday night, I decided to make a TikTok. I don't know why the inspiration struck when it did, but I hope you all enjoy this, I worked very hard on it. Big shout out to Rachel Estrera, my biggest inspiration.

Hope you Noho kids had a nice snow day :^)