Spring Break 2K20
Posted March 10, 2020 by William Crouch
The CoronaVirus has certainly thrown everybody for a whirlwind recently. It’s been difficult to keep track of what is and isn’t closed for the time being. Simmons, thankfully, was on spring break from March 9 to March 13 while most students went on vacation. For me, I had the great opportunity to take a week long intensive class at Simmons called “Moving Image Archives”. It ended up being my favorite class of the semester, so far. As stated in one of my previous blogs, I hope to work for the Walt Disney Archives one day and one of the parts of that archive is moving images. They have rare films like promotional ads from Walt that have helped reveal what his last taped appearance was. So taking this class not only helped me gain skills that will be very helpful in my journey as an archivist, but also made me seriously consider becoming a moving image archivist in the future.
The first day was normal and we got to handle old home movies and use tools that moving image archivists use. The second day, we got to analyze different film mediums like videotape, Betamax, and Laserdisc to see how they are categorized differently. One of the other cool things that we got to do was talk with archivists at the Harvard Film Archive and the Museum of Modern Art about how they preserve moving images. We were scheduled to go to Boston University’s archive and talk with their archivist but unfortunately things went a little sideways halfway through the week as Corona spread. Our class had to be cut short because of the rapid changes going on in the Boston area concerning the virus which was disappointing because I really enjoyed this class. However, safety should always be the top priority. If a class like this were to come around again, I would seriously consider taking it because of how cool it is to see how major studios preserve their films. While a spring break course may seem too intensive and overwhelming, I found it to be similar to a week long summer camp and grew really close with my classmates. If you get the opportunity, take a spring break course and get to have some fun.