The surprising challenge to making After The Fair

When you map out a project like this, you try to anticipate the challenges you could face. For this film, I assumed we would have a tough time finding people who would talk about the fair, and an even harder time getting permission to shoot at the dozens of fair-related sites around the country. It turns out, those things have been quite easy: everyone has been incredibly generous with sharing their time, and often providing us with more access than we could've hoped for to all of these treasures.

However, there's one thing that's proven far more difficult than I expected, and that's finding home movie footage of the fair. By my rough math, there should've been somewhere around 100,000 - 500,000 people with cameras at the fair over the two-year run. Granted that was 47 years ago, but let's assume 10% of the footage survives. That means there should still be 10,000 to 50,000 reels of footage out there somewhere. Unfortunately, most of it is probably withering away in attics, long forgotten, or perhaps without any way to watch it now.

Our challenge, and I hoping you can help, is to find those reels of film, and convert them for use in the film. If you (or your parents, or grandparents) attended the fair and shot footage, we would love to hear from you. Heck even if you weren't personally at the fair, I'd appreciate it if you could ask those you know who would've been the right age to attend.

Much like the relics of the fair themselves, we are slowly losing these films to heat, dust, and just plain old age. So please take a look, ask around, and let us know what you find.