Despite a wicked inner-ear infection that led him to hand over most of the day’s officiating responsibilities to Mayor Pro Tem Brewster McCracken, charismatic Austin, TX mayor Will Wynn personally stepped up to proclaim October 19th the official Home Movie Day in Texas’s capital city. Wynn declared, “We encourage all citizens to participate in celebrating home movies as a central component of our cultural heritage.” Local host Mat Darby accepted the fancy gold-stamped proclamation on behalf of the Austin HMD organizing committee, noting that “home movies and amateur films from Austin help show that history doesn’t happen just to famous people—it happens here, and it happens to all of us.” Video of the proclamation ceremony is available here.
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Home movies aren’t the only images that, with careful handling, will provide a lifetime of enjoyment (or at least awkward questions from strangers who see them). Tattoos are forever, too. In that spirit, then, we’re pleased to announce that artist Graham Chaffee of Hollywood’s Purple Panther Tattoo shop has donated a $100 gift certificate for tattoo work to be awarded at the Los Angeles Home Movie Day event this year.
Whoever gets it, send us a picture so we can post the first official HMD skin art here! (Note: tattoo need not be home-movie related, but we’ll sure be tickled if it is.)
Thanks are due to our friends at Basement Films in Albuquerque for inspiring this special prize…
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Six days to Home Movie Day, and the press coverage is starting to ramp up: there are articles and community-calendar blurbs and bloggings from Seattle, San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York and New Haven, Mobile and Miami, too.
Outside of the U.S., there’s been press for the Toronto event, which is shaping up to have another tidal wave of amazing stuff for 2008. This would be on top of the 500-plus reels that turned up last year…Hang in there, TIFFG folks!
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The deluge of field reports from Home Movie Day events around the country and around the world this weekend will be coming in soon, so we’re going to catalog a number of the preview reports from newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other websites that appeared in the days leading up to HMD 2008 while we still have a chance.
“Home movies are really beautiful. They’re really surprising, there’s always unexpected things happening. Even though, when you think of these movies, you think of pretty typical kinds of things, one of the fun things about Home Movie Day is that you never know what you’re going to get. In addition to lots of interesting variations on the usual topics, we’ll also get some things that we couldn’t predict at all.”
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