“Everyone wanted to be in charge of the film projector, because it carried with it a sense of power. It was almost like directing the movie yourself, except the actors weren’t moving, and there was a ‘BEEP’ telling you when to do things. But still. The problem with letting ordinary kids run the projector was that ordinary kids can be as undependable and shifty as a Swiss person, and it was often unclear which frame the strip should be on when the tape was started anyway, and so the pictures being projected were often out of sync with the soundtrack. Perceptive children such as myself would know almost immediately that we were off-track, but we were powerless to act, as the projector had been entrusted to someone else. Eventually there would be an obvious misalignment — the narrator would say, ‘Billy had fun sinning and carrying on in a shameful manner,’ but the picture projected would match what he was ABOUT to say, which was, ‘but soon he felt sorry and remorseful’ — and the projectionist would advance a frame or two and catch up. But in the meantime, the soundtrack not matching the images made it impossible to pay attention to the principles being taught, the same way you cannot listen to a sermon delivered by someone whose tie is crooked or whose hair looks funny. (I’m not the only one, right?)”

It was a book report on a biography of Ethan Allen I read as part of a history unit on the revolutionary war. I took close-up pictures of some of the illustrations from the book and told Ethan’s Allen’s story through the pix.

If you want to make a filmstrip of your own, use a 35mm camera loaded with slide film. Shoot in portrait, not landscape, and make sure the the direection the film eventually winds to is at the top of the camera as you shoot your pix.

When you go to develop the film, take it somewhere professional and ask them to leave the developed film uncut.

And yes, I’m sure that are those reading today who think to themselves, “What is this *film* of which you speak?”

I imagine any missionary from a certain era can do the beginning of the first vision film with the beeps in the right places.

Josef, Josef, waar been je geweest? BEEP

So, the projector Standard Optical was selling probably had no ability to play sound, and no film that would fit it could ever record it.

I remember the Standard Optical store in Provo–on Center Street between 1st and 2nd West. When I started wearing glasses in IIRC the fall of 1963, we skipped that place as too expensive and went someplace where a pair of glasses was about $13. Since I ended up needing about three pairs a year for nearly 10 years, it was important to find a discount spectacle shop.

[Deleting as irrelevant story of last pair of glasses replaced in an emergency, which "drowned" in the Provo River on Labor Day of 1973, 12 days before I entered the Mission Home in SLC. Dear Wife still maintains she was not actually trying to drown me too, but I'm waiting for conclusive proof.]

Ha! This made me laugh. I just *wish* I were too young to know what a film projector is. And no Ward Library was complete without one of those big, heavy, metal things!

Try this…next time you watch a class dvd, in RS or wherever, say ‘BEEP’ out loud at an appropriate pause, and see the response.Guaranteed, everyone of a certain age will smile, and probably join in