Southfield TV station offering free digitization of city-centric home movies

SOUTHFIELD — Southfield’s local television station is starting an initiative to digitize and preserve videos that pertain to the city.

Southfield Cable 15 is offering people the chance to digitize their old home movies that have been made and shot in Southfield. The station is hopeful that this program will lead to finding footage of Southfield landmarks or other recognizable aspects of the city.

According to the station, Cable 15 will “provide free cleaning and digitization of the following media that have a Southfield connection: 8 mm, Super 8 film, photos and slides. All materials will be returned intact to participants at no cost.”

Gary Watts, producer and director at Cable 15, said they have so far obtained three pieces of film to put into their Southfield Film Archive, but they hope that through the program they can increase their historical library.

“We’ll digitize it for free, as long as it’s something of Southfield,” he said. “That doesn’t mean like a birthday party from 1965. It has to have some sort of visual representation.”

The program is not restricted to residents. Watts said he received footage from a former resident who now lives in Florida who submitted films that Cable 15 digitized.

Watts also said people who send in videos need to sign a document that allows the city to keep a copy of the footage in exchange for the free digitization.

“It’s basically for our usage, and that usage would be either through programming at Cable 15 if we want to do a program and something comes up, or the Southfield Historical Society,” he said. “It would be shared between the library, the Historical Society and Cable 15. We just obtain the material and then it would be accessible for anyone here.”

Southfield Historical Society President Darla Van Hoey said the more people who participate, the better.

“We may not be able to identify everything. We’re interested in both people and buildings, structures that …may have been drastically modified,” she said.

Van Hoey, who lives in a home built in 1905, said a photo of her home from 1930 helped her rebuild the front porch to what it once was, and that experience showed the value of these archival materials.

“It’s a valuable preservation tool and it’s just really exciting just to see what was here before,” she said.

Watts said that through the program they can compare the landmarks that stand now with what stood in their spots in the past, illustrating how the landscape of Southfield has changed.

“I think the balance is kind of interesting and to show how we’ve grown as a city,” he said.

Anyone interested in digitization and who wants to learn more can contact Cable 15 at Cable15Listens@cityofsouthfield.com or call Watts at (248) 796-4507.