Welcome to News from the Giant, brought to you by the Reel Memories of the Lakehead project. News from the Giant is a series of 8 short vignettes from the Thunder Bay (formerly Port Arthur and Fort William) and Northwestern Ontario region. These vignettes are based on Year-End highlight reels that newstations and movie theaters of the day used to show, highlighting major events of the year (National and international archival highlight reels can be found in our “From the Archives” channel, such as the “News Parade of the Year” and “Canadian Headlines”). These vignettes represent a small portion of a very large collection of 16mm film that has been cleaned, spliced, and digitized for academic and public consumption. You can catch our “Making of” montage on this channel to see this process in action.
The Reel Memories collection contains roughly 500 film reels, the majority of which are 1,000 to 1,200 ft in length. That’s approximately 200 hours of archival footage that has been never before seen since its initial air date on the nightly news!

More information on the Reel Memories project can be found at www.finnishlabourtemple.com and www.thunderbaymuseum.com/reel-memories-of-the-lakehead/. If you are interested in supporting this project, there is an option to donate through both websites.

Please enjoy these fun, short clips as they offer a glimpse of the Lakehead’s history and people from 1954-1962!

This project was funded by the Thunder Bay Community Foundation, Thunder Bay Historical Museum, Friends of the Finnish Labour Temple, and Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation.

Producers – Ron Harpelle & Kelly Saxberg
Animation – Rommel Jay Cayanga & Keith Erickson
Editing – Katie Green
Writing – Dianne Brothers & Katie Green
Sound Recording – LIP Media Productions
Narrator – Dennis Dubinsky
Original Music – Adrien Harpelle
Sound Mix – LIP Media Productions
Research – Tom Peotto, Katie Green, Dianne Brothers & Brandon Cordeiro
Scanning – Tom Peotto
Archival – Thunder Bay Museum & Reel Memories of the Lakehead Project
Film Restoration – Brandon Cordeiro, Tom Peotto, Katie Green & Derek Okeese
Film Transfer – Brandon Cordeiro, Kelly Saxberg & Ron Harpelle

Special Thanks: Wayne Sheldon, Larry Urbanski, Riaz Mehmood & Donald Delorme