S8 Films Being Transferred to Digital

Yesterday I sent off 9 rolls of S8 film to Lost In Light for digital transfer. The footage has all been captured once before by me using a DV camera and projecting the image on a small 2' x 2' white posterboard. I used the footage to put together a collection of home videos on DVD - a project that took me months to create. I was very happy with the end result. I did the editing, soundtrack, DVD authoring, and cover art for the box and disc.

The advantage to having the footage captured professionally is that you get much clearer colors and a greatly reduced amount of flicker. Not to mention that it is a great way to preserve the footage.

Lost In Light is a great resource if you have S8 family films that you want captured. The service they provide is free. The only catch is that they encourage you to make your films Creative Commons and allow other artists to download and use footage from them. You maintain all rights to your work, you get the original films back, and you have the option of maintaining copyright if you choose that route over Creative Commons. But I like the idea of the films being out there. I think it encourages others to do the same, it broadens confidence in the artistic community, and it provides an online resource for preserving the films. What good are films anyway if they sit on a shelf for no one to see?

On that note, I want to share another film that I found on the LIL page. This by one of the founders of the project, Jen Proctor. It's called Alternative Forms of Energy. It's very unique in that it uses interview audio of a man talking about biodiesel, along with organic images from hand-processed S8 film, painted with india ink and manipulated with clorox. Talk about the physical act of film making! You just don't get that with digital. The images have the effect of playfulness on screen - contrasting blacks, whites and greys and bubbling supersaturated colors. Many times the film is like watching a dancing painting. The central images are natural ones - water, birds, islands of rock in the ocean - but these are flooded with the chaotic shapes of ink specs, lines, chemicals, and broken up by abrupt cuts. The narration keeps the whole thing linear and the edits take the pace and progress of the speaker. Overall, it's an intriguing short film to watch.

Welcome - First Post - Two Super 8 Films

I needed a place to post about my film projects as well as things that I find interesting in the world of film. This is that place.

This blog will primarily focus on small guage filmmaking, specifically Super 8 film, as well as screenwriting, film hints, tips, and tricks, and maybe a few movie reviews thrown in here and there.

So let's get started...
I am always on the hunt for impressive S8 material online. Today I happened upon a great site called Lost In Light which accepts various small guage films for submission and free transfer to digital in trade for making your film creative commons. They post your footage online at archive.org as well as their own site and allow people to download it for free. The benefit is that they will give you a free digitized copy of your material. For those that want to maintain copyright, have student or professional projects, this isn't the option for you - but for those that are artists or those that have old home films, this might be the ticket for you! I have some old home movies that I think would be perfect for this - stuff that I originally captured on my own using a DV camera and S8 projector - it's flickery and could be a lot better - so I see no harm in sharing it. Essentially, that's what this project is all about - sharing, preserving, archiving, and re-mixing. That's the other cool thing I didn't mention - you are free to download and re-mix the films that have been submitted.

NOTE: To download the films linked from here right click and do "save target as" - it will go faster

I found a really great S8 movie that I wanted to share with everyone. It's called Demolition 7. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND VIEW THIS FILM. Here's the description as written on the Lost In Light website:

Demolition 7 (by Richie Sherman, 2005, 8.5 min) is a whiskey-soaked journey through the county fairgrounds of Anywhere, USA. Through Lynyrd Skynyrd anthems blaring from PA speakers haphazardly attached to electric poles. Through frito pies and funnel cakes fingers, crowds of sticky sweet sugar, sweaty kids, and cheap beer. Through drunk friends passed out and sunburned, awaking to catch a glimpse of female figures on dirt mounds backlit by unforgiving setting sun before passing out again. Through squinting eyes and exhaust, sledgehammers clearing wheel wells. Half-ashed cigarettes dangling above 5/8″ sockets, the clicking of ratchets as mesh-hatted fat men in mustaches look on.
America, reduced to the serenity of a local girl singing the national anthem, the throttling of beaten engines, and the collective anticipation the moment before impact. The demolition derby is a beautiful symphony ending in a mist of radiator steam, smoke, and heavy night air that gently guides you from fairground field parking back home again. All of this so perfectly captured though sight in sound in Mr. Sherman’s little super 8 film.
– Aaron Valdez

This film represents exactly what I love about S8 film. You cannot achieve that richness, that texture, and that genuine black and white look with digital. This is pure film.

Another film that I would like to share is in line with my other passion - rock climbing. The Short Span (CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND VIEW) features bouldering in multiple locations in Ireland. We get a glimpse of everything from sea cliffs to lone boulders in the middle of a field. This film to me is one of the better rock climbing films/videos I've seen. There are some great camera movements, such as the 360 degreee shot around a large boulder, and several freeze float motion shots - which I still cannot fully figure out how he did. It's difficult for me to tell in some cases if this film was just kind of thrown together and he got lucky or if there was a true artistic vision in it - even some of the shots that appear washed out or blurry or glitchy work within the context and the modd of the film. It just proves that sometimes what you get on film is better than what you might have imagined while looking through the eyepiece.