Doug McCaffry's Heaven: Coffee and Films

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents -  The first time many Cortes Island residents heard of Doug McCaffrey was when he and his wife, Melanie, took over Becca's beans. Prior to that they were living in central Saanich.

"We came  for a vacation. It was a beautiful August, and I'd always wanted to come to Cortes.  I thought, 'hey, just for fun, let's look at some real estate.' The place we're at now had just come up for sale and came with  the optional coffee roastery.  I thought, 'well, I love coffee, let's learn coffee roasting.'  It all happened so fast. Two of the things I love most in life, coffee and film, and I'm in heaven," he explained.

"So many things have been captured on film over the past 120 years. There's millions of cans of film around the world. If these films aren't looked after, they're just going to disappear. I think it's very important that we archive, catalog and keep this window from the past with us. Digitizing and restoring, that's probably the bulk of what I do. Each project seems to be a little bit different. I work with archives and I'm learning more and more about the archives end of it."

The 2022 film festival at Mansons Hall was McCaffrey’s idea. 

"That was an interesting project, working with George Sirk, and having the Cortes Cinema film night. It seemed to be quite a success, and everybody enjoyed themselves. A lot of people regret missing it. I think we're going to have an encore. This March, maybe, we're going to team up with the Museum and Archives and do another film night of vintage Cortes Cinema."

 CC: How did you get into this business?

Doug Caffrey: "I got into graphic arts shortly after I  finished school. At that time there was a real labour shortage for skilled people, so I could pretty much pick and choose where I wanted to work.  I loved travelling back in those days, and so I could basically do working holidays almost wherever I went. I lived in New Zealand,  Britain, Southeast Asia Britain, and all around Europe."

"I would take the images, put them on a large plexiglass drum, and they'd spin at about 600 RPM, (go through) a fibre optic light and the images would come out the other end digitized. Then we could build whatever it is, a newspaper, a book, a magazine, a catalog, that sort of thing."

"It seemed like a natural progression moving on to motion picture film. I've always loved movies, especially foreign films and I started collecting Italian films on 16 mm. I'd find them on eBay and I ended up with a collection. I thought, 'hey, well, I'm in the graphic arts, restoring images, working on images and artwork. It can't be that much different from restoring motion picture film.' So I looked into it. I took some courses. I got a lot of help from a company in Austria  whose developed some amazing film restoration software and started doing that." 

"I thought, 'Why don't I look into buying a motion picture film scanner?' So I bit the bullet and basically took out another mortgage to get some of this equipment."

Top image credit:Old movie projector - Photo by emma.kate via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED)