Double Trouble

As part of the research and archive building for a social history film project I'm working on I recently had occasion to have some standard 8mm cine reels telecine'd by my friend and sometime producer, Richard Weeks of ONE REN. It can be a bit of needle in a haystack enterprise, you don't always know what you've got until it's been telecine'd, and you don't know if it will have that nugget you are searching for. Sometimes you get a brilliant surprise. Sometimes you just get frustrated. Today, it was the latter. The first reel that was done was double exposed, and not in a creative way with intent, just an accident, as was easier to do with standard 8... It promised to be fantastic, great up close footage of the Queens visit to the Royal Burgh of Renfrew in 1965 (Her Majesty was in town to open the brand spanking new modernist Sir Basil Spence designed Glasgow Airport at Abbotsinch) with some other bits and bobs I was after. Unfortunately our camera operator has reloaded their film and captured a holiday to Torquay and bits of a wedding on top of it.. and being optical / analogue media... the over-exposed ghosts of both are there on the processed celluloid. I can imagine the camera owner kicking themselves when the wee yellow envelope came back, as I did a wee bit as well, nearly 60 years later when my SSD drive came back. Such are the frustrations of working in archive. Anyway I thought I'd share (and thanks to the Love family for lending me their reels) I'm sure anybody working in this field has had this happen to them at some point, either at the camera end or at the archival end.