The Library Halloween Horror Competition

Our photographer Paul Shields has found a couple of 8mm rolls of film (this is literally found footage!), and to everyone's delight what turned out to be on them was a 13 minute Welcome To The Library video from around 1969. The best thing about it is there is no sound at all, which makes it, quite frankly, sinister.

We’ve digitised the film and would now like to make it available to you this Halloween, to download and remix into a horror trailer. 

Here’s our video to introduce you to some of the footage:

The winner will get their video on our YouTube channel, on our Instagram and our X too, and TikTok - and £30 of Amazon vouchers! (The runners up may well get their videos played on all our channels too.)

The rules and regs

Interested? Here are the rules of the competition:

1. This competition is open to students and staff at the University of York only 
2. You need to submit your video by uploading it to your Google Drive and sharing a link to this email address: lib-act@york.ac.uk, by midday on October 30th, so we have time to review them before announcing the winner on the October 31st in the afternoon. 
3. Your video must only consist of the original footage, which you can download from Google Drive here - a 1313MB .mov file. You can manipulate the footage, you can edit it, you can add effects - but you can’t film anything new to add into the video
4. You can add whatever audio you like, but do NOT use copyrighted material you don’t have permission to use 
5. We want you to remix the footage into some sort of horror trailer - how you do this is up to you but bear in mind shorter is probably better than longer... We chose horror because the footage is inherently creepy without sound and because it’s Halloween - however if you REALLY want to choose another genre for your trailer go for it. Surprise us! 
6. Don’t do anything that would harm the reputation of the University. We’re trusting you to be sensible here - obviously it’s a horror trailer, and it’s not serious, but just be mindful of the fact that this is footage of the library even if it is a long time ago… 
7. You can choose to share your video on your own channels if you wish, but it must be shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license with credit to the University of York library for the original footage 

Not yet a film maker? No problem, we've got training for that! 

If you're already a dab-hand at editing then that's fabulous, but if you're new to it don't worry, you can still take part. There's some fantastic guidance on the Practical Guide to Media Editing here and in fact the Creativity Lab are hosting an Online Video Editing session this very week! 

We can’t wait to see what you come up with.  Any questions, email lib-act@york.ac.uk.