Courtney Egan showed her version of the aftermath depicted in Hill's film, intercutting the decayed black-and-white frames with color footage Egan shot in the same spots a couple of months ago. The contrast is great - Egan's frames are vivid but the neighborhood's vitality is gone, replaced by overgrown weeds and debris.

"Living here, every day that you step outside you mentally compare everything, `That's gone, oh this looks awful now, this is fixed up,"' Egan said. "It's a daily catalog everybody goes through of their neighborhood path they travel on a daily basis." Her area was not flooded, so Egan was displaced for just a month. Graney raved over a couple of reels of parade footage brought in by others.

"Parades in New Orleans are like nothing else you see," he said. One was a 1952 Mardi Gras film shot on Kodachrome, a home movie donated to the Historic New Orleans Collection. Another showed a 1963 jazz funeral procession, also part of the collection.

"The fun thing about parade film, it had music," Graney said. "The Barry Martyn jazz quartet accompanied the films, and during the parade films (the musicians) recognized a lot of the musicians performing in the parades. They were chiming in to identify old friends they spotted, while playing."

At Santa Clarita's event held Aug. 12, a man seated several rows behind a woman who showed 30-year-old Super 8 footage from her home on a remote South Pacific island also had memories of the place. He had been serving in the Marine Corps, stationed in Guam, and by chance hopped aboard a Coast Guard mail run to the island in 1949. The two had never met.

Rene Broussard, Zeitgeist's founder and director, whose sizeable house in the hard-hit Lakeview area held 101/2 feet of standing water for a month, lost everything after the hurricane, including his video and editing equipment and two documentary projects he had spent more than 400 hours filming. Graney dubbed Broussard's entry - shot with one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping a hand-held camera that captured the town as it reopened to business owners - "surreal."

"There were thousands of vinyl and cardboard signs placed on (medians) advertising for mold removal, house gutting, roof, electric, plumbing, every kind of repair or demolition need," Broussard said. "They just let people back in legally ... I'm wondering how did these signs get there? You couldn't go anywhere in the city without seeing rows and rows of these signs."

Stasia Wolfe - who works at the Historic New Orleans Collection and helped with the event - closed escrow on her Los Angeles home the Friday before Katrina hit. She missed the hurricane, having returned to the West Coast for a week, but her husband evacuated to Lafayette with neighbors he had met hours before.

Santa Clarita resident Rhonda Vigeant, who founded Santa Clarita's Home Movie Day and owns Burbank-based film company Pro8mm, did not go, but she provided all of the supplies: pickup reels, leader, a splicer and splicing tape.

Though attendance was light, Graney pronounced the event a success. Swanson agreed, saying the group will build on its many New Orleans connections next year. He is helping others create an online guide to disaster recovery for home movie collections, and hopes to return to New Orleans next year.

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