Moving Image Archive: Search a Century of Footage by Describing the Shot

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Moving Image Archive: describe the shot, download the past

Moving Image Archive by Cova, designed by Jean. Free, no account.

Type “computer workers” into the search box and the archive returns the exact seconds of film where computer workers appear, each result labeled with its year and length, each with its own download link. It is a search engine for footage that treats a century of public-domain film as stock waiting to be reused.

  1. The query language is plain description. No tags to learn, no catalog codes. You describe a shot the way you would describe it to an editor, and embedding search does the matching. The asset paths name generations of models, openclip then luna, so the index visibly improves the way software does.

  2. The unit of the archive is the fragment, not the film. Results run from 2 seconds, a 1915 night at the show, a 1915 Alice in Wonderland, up to under a minute: Apollo-Soyuz at 5, a Corvair driving through a stream at 6, Gulliver’s Travels at 29, a 1961 projector maintenance film at 57. This is built for someone cutting b-roll, not watching features.

  3. Everything is free to reuse. The material is public domain, every shot carries a direct download link, and the About page says the point plainly. No paywall, no watermark games, no account. The rarest thing on the page might be how little it wants from you.

  4. The range runs 1915 to the 2000s without snobbery. Silent-era theater next to NASA engineering films, 1933 Chicago World’s Fair amateur reels next to 1939 amateur footage of the New York fair, industrial shorts next to Three Little Kittens from 1938. Amateur film sits beside official film with equal dignity, which is how the century actually looked.

  5. When search fails your vocabulary, 24 curated collections do the browsing. Technology holds 1,000 shots with sub-collections down to computers and interfaces at 122, robots at 47, space and flight at 116. Around them: Cats at 152, Film Grain at 129, Typography Over the Ages at 100, and Pale Blue Dot at 8. Eight shots, total. Restraint as curation.

  6. AI sits on both sides of this project and the About page shows it. Embedding models index the real footage; synthetic footage, in the page’s own words, “can now fabricate the past,” which is why preserving verifiable history matters more than ever. One side of AI makes the archive searchable. The other side is why it needs to exist.

  7. This is a 2026 project by two people, a growing library on R2 storage, and semantic search lives or dies on embedding coverage. Try your weirdest query first and judge the archive by what it misses, not by the homepage grid. Growing is stated up front, so hold them to it kindly.

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