Searching through our artifacts, we found two cans of 16mm movie film - small 400 foot rolls spliced together. We laid the film out across a "light box" (slide viewing table) and used a loupe to see what we was there, and found a lot of interesting scenes from Kwajalein. The Thompsons had a wind up Cine-Kodak Magazine 16 Camera, and had shot a lot while in the Marshall Islands.

The film had been stored in sealed metal cans, and suffered from "vinegar syndrome". It smelled like vinegar, and was brittle and warped (no longer flat). We didn't want to lose what we felt was a real treasure.

In July, 2005, we took the film to The UCLA Film and Television Archive, to digitize the film and preserve it as much as possible. Because of the warpage, parts of it did not register well in the scanner, which is why the clips occasionally seem to jump around and lose focus. The film was professionally color corrected and transferred to DVCAM.

We used the digitized video to create a DVD and the video clips here on this site.