Thirteen years on...

While waiting for my site to come online again after some downtime, I took a look back and realized it’s been 13 years since this little adventure began.

Yes, I first started working seriously on it in July 2000, having no previous web experience and knowing next to nothing about the internet. With a little help from a good friend, I started designing the site, planning it out and adding content.

I should mention that at the time all I had was an early Pentium III-based PC and a dial-up connection. The only software I had learned to use to design the pages was Netscape Composer.

For the content, apart from images found on the web (Webfinds) I had a scanner and a nifty device from a firm named Play, called the Snappy Video Snapshot. It was a framegrabber that connected to the parallel port, had a couple of RCA sockets to get a video signal in and out, and was powered by a 9V battery. It could yield, by “oversampling” a frame, a digitized image with the phenomenal (for the time) resolution of 1500x1125 pixels. When capturing a still image, it would resample 4 times, going "click-click-click-click" like the shutter of a camera.

Winona Ryder in her Kelly headscarf from “Great Balls of Fire”, from a VHS copy. The picture is not full size but the low quality of VHS is evident. However, as seen in the two pictures below, more detail of the scarf wrapped around Noni's throat can be seen here than in the DVD version.

Unfortunately, no amount of technological wizardry can put more resolution in an image than it had at the beginning. The Snappy could get incredible results from live cameras, from laserdiscs and so on, but all I had back then were videotapes.

Winona again, on the left the Snappy-taken capture from a VHS tape, on the right a capture from the DVD edition.

 

Joan Allen in a Classic wrap from Pleasantville.VHS on the left, DVD on the right.

The Snappy had its limitations (it ate 9V batteries so much that I ended up connecting it to a power adapter) but it was essential to generate the first ever videocapture galleries. I even used it for the first DVD captures, straight from the player because I had no DVD reader on my PC. For some of the galleries, those VHS snaps are the only images likely to ever be, since some of the tapes are either damaged or missing, there is no DVD or Blu-Ray edition and re-airings of the originals are unlikely. So, blessed be the Snappy Video Snapshot.

Once I had the images, I had to build a gallery for them: at the time, I did it all manually by simply putting the thumbnails (generated with a script) in a grid as links to the full-resolution images. It was long, tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately I learned about the automated web galleries generation feature on the (then) new versions of Adobe Photoshop, which made this far quicker and easier.

Of course it also meant I went a little overboard, there are videocapture galleries with more than 200 pictures in them! However, this was before YouTube, before Flickr. These days this old site, with its simple color scheme, its dated design, its lack of features (it never had frames, or java, or flash content) really shows its age. It was born in the age of the first great scarf sites, like SWS and the (alas) now gone Scarf Fashion Site.

The SFS even had its own original content and models, and I for one can't have enough of those beauties.

The Contribution section started when I began to receive pictures from other enthusiasts, which was a thrill. Then the "Various" section came in, with articles - which now are covered by the blog.

The web is a different place now. There are Flickr galleries and YouTube channels dedicated to headscarf-wearing women. There are new sites, as well, far better designed than mine. Out of nostalgia, and even after having to search for a new home for it and move it now and then, I will keep it going. There will be the usual monthly updates but gone are the days of the hundreds of images. There is little point, and the galleries now mostly serve to point out scene in movies or TV shows so that viewers can seek them out for themselves.

There is still the thrill of the hunt and the collector's fever, of course. I sort of enjoy searching out for those scenes, sometimes from just hearsay or from a single scene. The search-by-image feature of some search engines comes in really handy now, although most of the time I'm still back at the old IMDB perusing.

Well, 13 years have passed. Here's to more, and I hope you enjoyed this little trip into nostalgia!