The Man Who Develops the World's Found Film

It’s happened to everyone. You’re rifling through a bin at a thrift store, or a garage sale, or an unmarked box in your attic, and you find an undeveloped roll of film. The thought crosses your mind: should I get this developed? See what’s on it?

But who has time these days to find a convenient place to develop it, let alone pay for the process.

That question, and that obstacle, are exactly what led Boise, Idaho-based photographer and video producer Levi Bettwieser to start a website called the Rescued Film Project. After years of stockpiling his own thrift store finds, amassing about 140 rolls of 35-millimeter film, he spent a day developing them all.

“I was astounded by the amount of images I was able to get off just those few cameras in my local area,” says Bettwieser. “And I connected with them because a lot of them looked like images I had in my photo albums as a kid.”

That was three years ago. Bettwieser quickly tapped out his local thrift store supplies and started going after rolls sold through online auctions.

His site posts his finds, as well as soliciting donations of other people’s undeveloped film. In those first batches he developed there were all the usual things people snap photos of: celebrations, vacations, loved ones. Nothing “too astounding” according to Bettwieser. But one series of images stood out.

The images were surreal, otherworldly. “It seems to be these two young boys who are sharing and taking pictures of each other under water and there were some really incredible bubbles,” he says.

Bettwieser wavered about his decision to put the found images online, as he didn’t want people to feel like their privacy had been invaded or that they were being made fun of.

But when he took the plunge, he also offered up his services to people with undeveloped rolls. Volunteers send their film to him after signing over their rights to the images and Bettwieser keeps the negatives. In many communities, the resources to develop such film is vanishing or gone. Large photo processors, like Walmart, typically don’t have experience handling different sizes of film, degraded film, or black and white film. And even where experienced photo processing facilities exist, some people simply don’t want to spend the money on film that may or may not offer up images. For those who don’t want to give up the rights to their images, Bettwieser recommends places they could pay to have it developed.

“I don't care who’s processing the film as long as it gets rescued,” he says.

Since he started soliciting film, Bettwieser has received about 140 donations, and some of those have been single donations of over 100 rolls. He receives around three donations a week and has a backlog of around 2,000 rolls to process and several hundred images to scan. There are over 16,000 images in his archive. The project is a one-man operation that he works on before and after work and on the weekends.

“When it starts to feel like a job or work that's when I have to step away from it,” he says.

Most of the content he finds falls in the G-rated to PG category. He does find the occasional naked photo, which he doesn't publish. Those are rarer, he says, probably because people were more careful about taking revealing photos when they knew a processor would have to look at them.

“From the earliest images all the way up to my newest images, they usually revolve around holidays, typically Christmas and Halloween,” says Bettwieser. “Those are two of the most common types of images I get. Birthdays and birthday cakes. I probably have more images of birthday cakes than I do actual birthday parties, which is kind of interesting. Cats and dogs. There’s a lot of pictures of cats and dogs, and vacations.”

He has uncovered more unusual fare, though, such as several images from World War II that made a splash online when he published them in 2015. Those images were the result of an $800 investment, his largest and most “nerve-wracking” purchase to date.

And there were the 10 rolls of black and white 35mm film from New York that appeared to be the work of a voyeur who photographed women on the street from their window.

“But he was also a great photographer, there were some really amazing landscapes of the New York skyline with the World Trade Towers and fireworks at night,” says Bettwieser. “That was probably one of the most interesting batches I got in terms of I had several rolls from one photographer which gives you a better sense of who they are.”

He also received a cache of black-and-white images of California car crashes that depict vehicles slid off the road and people being carried away in stretchers. One roll of film offered up images of an arctic voyage aboard a ship and with a biplane.

The images he unearths have tantalizing, if unknowable, mysteries embedded in them.

“You see a bunch of Backstreet Boys posters on the wall, it’s an early ‘90s kid,” says Bettwieser. “It’s fun, but it’s also frustrating, sitting there and trying to tell the story. I love pictures that have a lot going on in the background. A lot of people, the first thing they’ll look at is the person in the photo, and they’re usually smiling like you do in a photo, but you don’t know if they’re actually happy in that moment. Looking at their environment tells you more about them, what’s on their shelves, how nice it is, how clean it is.”

Eventually he would like to make his site more searchable, with metadata and crowdsourcing so that people can reunite the images with people close to them. This happened once, when he posted a photo on Instagram and a Portland woman recognized her father at a family gathering where she was given a dog as a childhood gift.

One thing, though, is notably missing—selfies. Bettwieser says he does occasionally find photos of the camera-wielder but that they usually show up at the end of roll when someone is trying to “burn off” film.

“So many pictures in the archive are the truest form of what’s going on at that moment and there’s no self-editing, no instant playback, people’s eyes are closed,” says Bettwieser. “They’re more honest.”

Many people don't realize that the lifespan of CDs is limited. Some brands are better than others. But many cheap brands have a thin layer that will degrade and flake off after a couple decades, rendering the digital data unreadable. Best option is to get a photo processing place to print your most cherished photos to both paper and a new CD/DVD. At least on paper, a photo will last for many decades (professional silver paper, not inkjet printed paper!).

Good point about CDs. They do degrade over time, as do DVDs. You don't really notice it so much on audio DVDs as they are designed to play even with significant losses. I still have the very first CD I ever purchased (Dark Side of the Moon), and it plays fine without noticable issues, though it's probably more than 30 years old now.

However, data is a different story. First, the process of burning a CD is somewhat different from the techniques used on mass-produced audio disks. It has so far shown itself to be more succeptable to aging than audio disks. So, if you're going to store stuff on disks you burn yourself, I'd strongly recommend that when you do so that you make at least 2 copies. That way, if a single file on a disk is corrupted, you can most likely recover it from your secondary copy. As time passes, and tech advances, it's a good idea to migrate from old disks to new ones. Yes, it's a pain, but it will ultimately save you lots of heartache in the long run.

What I've done for my backups is to migrate from CD to DVD. (actually, with some of my data I went from Floppy, to CD, now to DVD). One advantage of this, in addition to refreshing the copy, is that you can generally consolidate as you go. One CD is at most 750MB of data, while a DVD can be 4.5GB to 8GB depending upon whether or not you use dual-layer disks or not.

If you have a lot of data, such as vids and stuff, which take up a lot of space, even going to DVD can leave you with a lot of disks to store and keep track of. These days, SD cards are pretty cheap, and provide some incredible storage capacities. As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on the longevity of these things, but I don't see why they shouldn't last as long or even longer than optical media like DVDs and CDs as long as they aren't subjected to extremes of temperature. (I've had micro-sd cards go through the washer and dryer and not had it affect them as far as I could see. (though I wouldn't trust such a card for long term storage).

Finally, since hard drives have gotten so cheap, for insane storage capacity, they are also a viable medium for archival storage.

In all cases, I strongly recommend 2 copies of everything with a refresh of the data at least every 5 years. I keep one hard drive of my archives in a safe-deposit box so it's offsite and in a rather temperature-controlled environment.

I shudder to think of how much family history has been lost due to poor backup procedures. The same is true for governmental records. The amount of data NASA has lost because they can no longer read mag-tapes of early mission data is astounding.

That's the idea. At least 2 copies, preferably on 2 different types/brands of media. Murphy's Law applies, things go wrong over time. I've had old stored hard drives fail after trying to extract data. I've had a big box of photos get destroyed by water damage; the negatives stored with the paper photos also got destroyed. I waited too long to attempt digital conversion of old 35mm video but the nitrocellulose of the film degraded and rotted. And I've had CDs and DVDs fail. I do have audio CDs from the early 1980s and they still work fine. But the type of digital CDs that people burn themselves are for the most part poorly constructed.

If you place your media in a home safe, place it in airtight bags with those silica gel desiccant bags, because home safes contain a lot of moisture. Best to vacuum seal the airtight bags; the machines are cheaply obtained. I vacuum seal a lot of old stuff to keep it from rotting. SD cards and USB sticks are pretty reliable, but even then I've had USB sticks fail. So multiple backups on different media is a good idea.

I’ve got to wonder if newer CDs will last as long as the older ones. Doesn’t sound like the music industry to actually sell you something that you don’t have to replace every 5 years does it? Of course, since I rip all my CDs to my computer, most of them only get used once or twice these days, so barring environmental issues, they should hold up.

One thing I’ve noticed about the older albums is that they really weren’t mastered that terribly well, I’m guessing because the engineers weren’t really as familiar with the digital format as they were with analog tapes. You can really tell when you rip the older stuff because you see some weird artifacts show up occasionally. For those, I’ll rip it to a raw file, and pop it into a sound editor to play with the levelling. It can make a big difference on the final audio files. In particular, whoever did the A->D conversion on the first 2 The Cars albums did a horrible job with the volume, like they didn’t realize the dynamic range of a CD or something.

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