About the Project

Amateur filmmakers look differently at the places in which they live and move, they open up new perspectives on historical events and offer insights into everyday culture in Vienna during the 20th century.

The Austrian Film Museum preserves numerous films shot by private individuals in Vienna between the 1920s and 2000s. These films document people's lives and surroundings on analog film and provide a unique resource for exploring everyday culture and contemporary history.

The Reel Adventures project makes these private film documents digitally accessible. Digital technologies support their indexing, presentation, and dissemination. Through high-resolution digitization, AI-based analysis, and time-based annotations combined with geodata, users can view the films and specifically search for places, people, themes, and events - all without needing to visit the museum's archive.

A particular focus of Reel Adventures lies in providing context: the films have been extensively researched, enriched with film talks and viewing notes, and supplemented with contextual materials such as text documents, photographs, objects, and filmmaking equipment.

In collaboration with research and technology partners - the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History, the Vienna University of Technology, and max.recall - the Film Museum presents digitized film documents in a way that reveals and makes tangible the connections to locations, historical events, and the life stories of amateur filmmakers. Digital exhibitions in the form of five curated guided tours offer deeper insights.

Project Team - Austrian Film Museum

Florian Haag
Jona Haidenthaler
Anna Högner
Lisa Leitenmüller
Eszter Kondor
Raoul Schmidt
Claudio Santancini
Georg Wasner
Michela Buttu (Internship)
Sara Piñeros Cortés (Internship)
Gerhard Schindler (Internship)
Laura Wegscheider (Internship)

Project Team - Partner Institutions

Dr. Ingo Zechner, Ronny Günl, Jakob Zenzmaier (LBIDH - Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History)
Robert Sablatnig, Daniel Helm, Tingyu Lin (TU Wien - Vienna University of Technology)
Helmut Berger, Ronald Genswaider (max.recall)

Project Management

Michael Loebenstein
Stefanie Zingl

Project Duration

January 2023 to December 2024

Funding

Funded by the Vienna Business Agency. A fund of the City of Vienna.

Project Partners