Home movie releases

Over the years, some of the home movies that were shot of the Beatles have found their way to official releases. 8mm and super 8mm home movie cameras were the rage in the sixties, and it was that era’s equivalent of today’s video cameras. I believe Dezo Hoffman was the man who introduced the home movie camera to the Beatles, and they all bought their own. Some of their films were used in the Beatles Anthology TV series, and later in the DVD version of the series.
The illustration above depicts commercial releases of home movies over the years. Two of those are DVD’s and two are VHS releases. Mal Evans’ home movies, stuff from the Magical Mystery Tour trip and stuff from the filming of Help! in Austria and the Bahamas.
Silent, but often in colour, the home movie cameras captured stuff that otherwise would have not been documented on film, like the Beatles’ last concert at Candlestick park, the “Mad Day Out” or the Beatles final photo session at Tittenhurst park.
Sometimes, different people have filmed and recorded something, which makes a new interesting hobby for video editing amateurs, merging a bootleg recording with a newly found old home movie from the same event. Unfortunately, this was not predicted by the filmers, so they just filmed bits and pieces of a song, not knowing that some time in the future, song and film could be combined.