DECADES IN COLOUR is “crowd sourced history”. We asked New Zealanders to share their home movies and filmed experiences with us. It’s an unofficial history – more “collected memory” than factual chronology. The results were wonderful; we now have over 2000 sources of personal colour footage from the 1940s to the 1980s. Many people who contacted the Decades team for Series 1 had little or no idea what their reels of (sometimes-vinegar-smelling) film contained; they were an inheritance from family members or, in one case, a random find in a local dumpster. Others had taken the film themselves and had fabulous recollections of shooting it, but hadn’t seen the images for years. Relatively little was digitized. We contracted a specialist film archivist/transfer specialist to the team and set up detailed submission and caretaker processes. A 3 x 1-hour series (1950s, 1960s, 1970s) hosted by Judy Bailey and screened on Prime TV, was successful enough in connecting with an audience that we are now completing Series 2 - a further three episodes, expanded to cover 1940-1989 and themed Work, Home, Play.
