• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, December 23, 2025

On the masthead of this post, you’ll see the name Media Insider. Next to it, you see the name of this publication: MediaPost. Media is a word we writers use a lot here, but may not stop to think about the origin of the word itself. Media is the plural of medium, and in our particular context, medium is defined as “the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses.”

When defined this way, media are powerful stuff. Let me give you a personal example.

At a recent family gathering, a few cousins were talking about 8 mm old home movies. Some of you know what I’m talking about. You might even have some yourself, stuck somewhere in your attic or basement. They came in yellow-orange boxes from Kodak and might have “Kodachrome II” on the front.

In my case, I had some I salvaged from my mom during her transfer to her care facility. Two of my cousins similarly took custody of their films from their respective mothers. I packed what I could of these in my suitcase and gingerly transported them home, after trying to explain what they were to a curious TSA official and why they couldn’t go through an X-Ray scanner.

When I got them home, I transferred them to digital. Then, starting Dec. 1, I have been sharing small snippets of the resulting videos with the rest of my family, one a day in a type of home movie Advent Calendar.

Most of these home movies were shot between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, capturing picnics, weekends at the family cottage north of Toronto, weddings, birthdays, and other assorted occasions. I’ll soon tell you what this sharing of one particular medium has meant to my family and I, but first I want to give you a little background on 8mm home movies, because I think it helps to understand why they were such an important medium.

The 8mm format was introduced by Kodak in 1932. It was actually a 16mm format that had to be flipped and run through the camera twice. In processing, the film would be split and spliced together to create a 50-foot reel, capturing about three to four minutes.

Kodak hoped to extend the ability to make movies to the home market, but between the Great Depression and World War II, the format didn’t gain real traction until the post-war consumerism boom. Then, thanks to smaller cameras that were easier to use and improved picture quality, 8 mm movie cameras became more commonplace and started showing up at family gatherings and events.

It would have been in the mid-1950s that my mother’s family bought their first cameras. My grandfather and grandmother, a few great uncles and my mom and dad all became amateur movie makers.

It was the results of this movie-making boom in my family that I started delicately threading the fragile film into a digital scanning system, and letting grainy and poorly lit moving pictures transport me back to a time I had only heard stories about before.

I never met my maternal grandfather, who passed away two weeks after I was born. I also never knew my father. He tragically died when I was just one year old. These were two man I desperately wanted to know, but never had the chance. I only knew them through still photos and stories passed on from older family members.

But suddenly, there they were: moving, laughing and living. My grandfather teasing my grandmother mercilessly and then sitting back in his easy chair with a big smile on his face as he watched his family around him. My father at his and my mom’s wedding, holding a huge cigar in one hand while he picked confetti out of his hair with the other.

“My God!,” I thought, “he stands just like me!”

This medium brought my grandfather and father back to life for me, coloring in the outline sketches I had of who they were. For my family, these movies reconnected us to our younger selves, introduced  younger members to their direct ancestors, and shed new light on figures in our past that had been shrouded in the shadows of time.

Because of this project, two things became clear to me. First of all, if you have also inherited old media filled with family memories, find the time to transfer them into a medium that allows them to be shared and preserved for the future.

The act of archiving brings up images of bespectacled staff peering over dusty tomes. But it is simply the act of imbuing the past with a type of permanence so it always remains accessible.

Secondly, recognize the importance of any type of medium that captures the moments of our lives. Rick Prelinger, an archivist in California, has compiled a collection of over 30,000 home movies. He published a list of 22 reasons why home movies are important. For me, number 21 resonated most deeply: “Showing and reusing [these movies] today invests audiences with the feeling that their own lives are also worth recording.”

I’m sure my dad or granddad had no idea of their own impending mortality when they were captured in these movies. They didn’t realize the importance of the moment -- or the medium.

But today, these movies are one of the all-too-rare things I have to remember who they were. For me, it was this medium that erased the time and distance between my senses, here at the end of 2025, and that day in June, 1957 --- the day my parents got married.

Thank heaven someone was there with a camera.