THE first thing that strikes anyone watching the short film Peddlers’ Progress is the richness of the colours: lush green grass, warm tartan checks and the warmth of the skintones.

The glorious footage from the 1940s follows a group of youngsters on summer bike rides around Loch Lomond and Glen Coe and it’s a shock to see it all in wonderful colour. We always think of the past in black and white.

The charming travelogue that meanders around youth hostels and is infused with a post-war sense of optimism is just one of thousands of archive films from across the country that will available to view for the first time, thanks to the British Film Institute’s About Britain on Film project.

One of the most significant ever undertaken by the BFI it features content from the national archive as well as nine regional archives, including Scottish Screen Archive.

The wealth of rarely and unseen content encompasses amateur footage, newsreels, TV, feature films and documentaries all now digitised.

“I adore Peddlers’ Progress, it’s one of my favourite films,” says Robin Baker, head archivist at BFI. “I think it’s one of those transformative things when people see the past in colour.

“It has been shot on 16mm and not many people could afford the camera or the film in that period but when you get that Kodachrome film and the colours preserve beautifully well, I think that’s a great example of a film that just looks sensational.

“It almost reminds me of a Famous Five adventure.”

After two years of work, 2500 films have now been made available and can be viewed on the BFI Player, with more than 90% of them free to watch.

“The digital age has been a revolution. People think the process is very simple but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth,” explains Robin.

“When you’re dealing with film of the age of most of the material we have it is really hard. We have at least three films from Scotland from 1901, so you can imagine what an original piece of film from that time is like: it has shrunk and warped and the emulsion could be peeling off it.

“To even scan that is totally different. You have to do it frame by frame, very gently and very carefully. It is an incredibly skilled and time-consuming process.”

He adds: “It has been great to bring together so many collections to be seen in one place, that makes it far easier for the general public and also it becomes far greater than the sum of its parts.”

We might know a location well but the ability to step into the past that these films offer is truly magical.

Holidays footage from the 1950s shot in Skye, Mull, on the Ballachulish ferry and around Fort William takes Robin back to childhood holidays more than a decade later in the same places.

“It feels so deeply nostalgic. Some films also capture key points of social history. One amateur film I love is the footage of the last days of the tram in Glasgow from 1962. It is so beautiful and marking such a watershed in a city’s history. There are fantastic portraits of the people and places you see en route.

“Films that capture that sense of an end of an era, we all feel really quite emotional about.”

Other Glasgow footage includes a real-time journey down Great Western Road in 1980, looking at shoppers, church-goers and businesses long gone. Others, such as Cooper’s pub on the corner of Bank Street, are still there.

“The range of filmmakers is phenomenal, some of them we know so little about,” says Robin. “The credit for Peddlers’ Progress, for example, is EJGS Film Production. No-one, not even the Scottish Screen Archive, has a clue who that was.

“One of the things I hope comes out of this project is someone coming forward and tells us. We’re encouraging people to share these films on Twitter and Facebook and once you start getting debate and discussion out there everyone will benefit in terms of knowledge.”

The films include a lot of work made by amateurs that cinema audiences would never usually get a chance to see. Often intimate snapshots of a time and place they may have only been viewed by a handful of people in the past.

A newsreel of the Up Helly Aa Viking festival in Lerwick from 1927 particularly appealed to Robin.

“As well as seeing endless people dressed up as bonkers-looking Vikings at the end there’s an amazing scene with a whole lot of walruses on the coast, on the rocks with waves crashing behind them,” says Robin.

“Then suddenly they stand up and they are men in walrus costumes. It is a fantastic moment.”

The BFI hopes to have about 10,000 films available within the next two years, a huge leap forward on previous offerings but only the tip of the iceberg of the archive.

Watch out more for intriguing films coming to a small screen near you...

Visit www.bfi.org.uk/britain-on-film