While good storage can vitally lengthen the life of your film, your film risks continued physical damage through poor or misguided handling. This section looks at processing, how you hold film; on reel and unreeled, how to wind film, how to join or splice it and how to test and maintain a projector so that your film can pass through safely.
Processing
After you have finished shooting, the image on
the film is unfixed or latent and particularly sensitive. High
or varying heat and humidity pose persistent problems with moving image care
but at this stage such factors may cause considerable deterioration to the
image. To avoid these problems,
it is best to have your film processed soon after you finish shooting.
Holding
To avoid leaving fingerprints, films should always
be held by their edges. Fingerprints
can affect sound as well as picture and may even lead to clicks on the sound
track. If you need to touch the image or sound track, you should wear
gloves, but again you need to be careful. If you wear cotton gloves and
the film has many splices, sometime the stickiness of the tape can pick up
fluff. You also need to be careful that no possible tears in the film
get caught in the thread of the glove. It could lead to greater tearing. The
other option is to wear surgical gloves but these can get quite sweaty.
Winding
While films should be wound with a certain tension
to ensure that they unspool evenly and stay attached to their core, be careful
not to wind the film too tightly. This puts the film under unnecessary
strain and can cause stretching which may lead to brittleness. Cinch marks
or diagonal abrasions on the emulsion surface may also form.
If you are working with a hand painted film, high-tension winding could be disastrous for the paint, and even worse would be to pull the film to tighten the wind. Hand-painted films should obviously be handled and treated with great care.
Splicing
If you are looking after films, and you haven't already
got one for editing, you may wish to get hold of a splicer (tape or cement).
This is especially advised if you intend to project your film (regularly). A splicer is integral for fixing tears, breaks and poor splices from the past and can, with care, be used to fix some perforation damage at the side of your film. When fixing perforations, try not to get splicing tape on the image. If you are working with 16mm or even 35mm, you should be able to get specific pre-punched perforation repair tape. If the film is shrunken, it can only be patched by cementing in an undamaged section from a film with the same shrinkage level. (It is probably best to leave this to a professional).
Most perforation damage results from improper take up in the projector and can be avoided with a lengthy section of leader spliced to the beginning and end of the film. A length of at least roughly two arm spans or four metres is a reasonable amount to attach.
Projection
Always check to see if the film you are going to
show has any particular instructions for projection, noting the projection
speed and the type of soundtrack it has, if any. When spooling up the
film, check all splices to see how strong they are. Any weak splices
should be re-spliced.
Make sure you are familiar with the projector and its lacing procedure.
There are some guideline below for cleaning and checking, but you should refer to the manual for more precise cleaning instructions.
Clean the sprocket teeth with a toothbrush. The aperture plate and filmshoe should be cleaned with a soft gate brush or camelhair brush. A selvyt cloth with alcohol should be used to remove dirt and emulsion residue on the rollers and other surfaces. The film path can also be cleaned using can air.
Once the projector is clean, you need to test it to see if it will scratch your film. To do this you should make a loop of clean, unmarked leader and run it through the machine seven or eight times and then check, very carefully, both the base and the emulsion side for scratches. Do not use a projector that scratches.
Once the film is running, do not leave it. If the film becomes damaged through the course of projection, you should stop projecting the film. When it comes to rewinding a film, take it out of the projection gate and rewind it over the top or on a rewinding bench.