This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When designer Matthew Kepler was teaching film history at a school in Jordan, he discovered 850 canisters of film reels dating back to the early 60s. "The labels indicated rare documentary footage shot just after the Six Day War, Russian [propaganda] during the Cold War and unseen footage of King Hussein," says Brooklyn-based Kepler. His big problem: the reels were disintegrating with age and he didn't have the money to save them.
So he built the Kinograph, an open-source film-scanning machine that turns film reels into digital videos -- for $1,200 (£750). "Even the most well-funded institutions cannot usually afford digitisation," he says. "A dedicated film scanner costs $250,000 on average, and lab services can cost up to $900 per reel; a two-hour feature film is about 12 reels." Made from a combination of off-the-shelf and 3D-printed parts, and used in conjunction with any consumer camera, the Kinograph can scan 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film.
Kepler is currently planning to Kickstart the machine, so he can sell kits and build a DIY community around saving historic films. "Kinograph can help save the images that defined our previous century," Kepler says. "Cultural heritage should not be dependent on money or technology."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
