Fascinating film of the Ipoh Swimming club from June 1956

The vintage 8mm home movie shown below was taken at the Ipoh swimming club in the city of Ipoh, Malaysia sometime before June 1956. The film also features a school sports day at the Anderson school in the same city.

The 8mm film featuring the Ipoh Swimming club

Read on to learn more about the film and how I processed it.

Scanning and Processing the film

The film is one that I’ve had in my collection of 8mm vintage home movies for quite a long time, having purchased it, as a small set of 3 or 4 films which were all taken in Asia in the mid 1950s. This film is the shortest of the collection, consisting of about half a 5 inch reel.

I did the initial digitisation using my home constructed film scanner, and then used Davince Resolve to clean up the resultant mp4 file.

The actual raw film straight from the scanner had a very pronounced green cast which I thought would be very difficult to fix, but in fact I was amazed that just a simple boost of the red channel in the Resolve colour page made an astounding difference and brought the majority of the film back to looking pretty good.

The images below show the difference the edit made.

Seeing the colour cast made me think that the film stock used must have been one of the E6 process films such as Ektachrome, because they don’t generally hold up to the passage of time, but when I looked at the identification marks on the side of the film I found it was actually Kodachrome, which normally retains its colour well.

The only actual edits I made to the film were to remove some blank sections, try to fix the exposure in a few places, make the correction to remove the colour cast and add a small amount of sharpening. I then added a title to the front of the film, and a border around to tidy up the edges.

The Ipoh Swimming club film contents

The first part of the film, as the title suggests, was shot at the swimming club in Ipoh, Malaysia. There is still a club of that name in existence, and when I look at the photo on google earth it looks to me as if the buildings and pool shown in the film still exist at that location. Obviously, much of the surrounding countryside has changed and is now built up, but at least some of the views the swimmers in 1956 would have seen remain.

The longest part of the film was taken at a school (The Anderson school) in the same city of Ipoh, and it’s this event that allows me to date the film accurately. There is a sequence in the film where the photographer has shown a brochure for the event which states clearly that the sports day will be held on Saturday 30th June 1956.

The sports day was clearly a school event rather than an athletics event because there are events like a ‘wheelbarrow race’, but there are also events like pole vault, shot put and high jump. It’s interesting now watching the high jump which looks so different to the current method of flopping over the pole backwards – this was filmed about 12 years before Dick Fosbury changed the way high jumpers approach the bar.

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