Super-8. Anyone here use it?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was browsing eBay to see what Beaulieu R16s are going for nowadays. (Not that I need one or will buy one; just looking.) There’s only one, but there are a number of Beaulieu super-8 cameras. I have a Beaulieu 5008.S, two Elmos (one is my first movie camera), and a ‘Quartz’ Russian spring-wound super-8.

I know that the old 4008 is a popular super-8 camera that’s sometimes used in ‘real films’ (having been retrofitted with a crystal-synch motor). A Polish Vampire in Burbank, Curse of the Queerwolf and Zombie! vs. Mardi Gras were feature-length films that were shot on super-8. I think some bits of Natural Born Killers was shot on super-8. There are a lot of hobbyists who still use the format, and some artistic filmmakers like it.

Super-8 started to die in the mid-'80s when VHS recorders started to get cheap enough for people to buy. Kodak no longer makes super-8 sound film. (Unlike professional equipment, ‘home movie’ equipment sometimes had single-system sound – a magnetic stripe on the film.) A consumer shooting at 18fps would pay about $5 (at the time) for 3:20 of film. Someone shooting at 24fps, the standard for professional films (25fps in Europe), would have 2:30 fo film. Then there’s processing. And you need to drag out the projector and have a dark room to watch the footage. VHS gave people 120:00 with sound, and no processing. Video cameras got cheaper, and the formats improved. Betamax died. So did VHS-C. Finally, so did VHS camcorders. 8mm tape gave VHS quality in a smaller package. Hi-8 improved the image dramatically. Now we have a few digital formats.

Why wouldn’t consumers stop buying super-8 film cameras? My first super-8 camera cost $760. That’s 1980 dollars. My first VHS system cost about $800 in 1985 and used a camera connected by a cord to a portable (rather heavy) deck. Super-8 was far more portable and easy to use back then. But now, for 800 current dollars, I can get a kick-ass digicam that’s smaller than the super-8 gear I used to use. There’s no more sound film; and the last time I looked, a super-8 silent cartridge was pushing $20 without processing.

But I still like super-8. I like the look of film. I don’t have a use for it just at the moment, but I want to shoot some footage sometime. I have a few rolls of outdated film in the freezer. I might be able to use it in an actual film so that I have some contrast with the 16mm.

What about you? Do you still have any super-8 equipment? Do you ever use it? Do you want to use it? What’s some of the cool stuff you’ve shot on super-8? If you have kids, have you thought of teaching them how to use it? (I’m thinking here that it might help to teach aspiring filmmakers the value of thinking before they shoot, since their resources would be limited.) What super-8 stories do you have?

2

I was a TV intern back in the late 70’s and on location we did our shooting with spine-crippling “portapacks”: shoulder-strapped reel-to-reel videotape recorders, bigass cameras, and fifty pounds of gelcel batteries on a belt around the waist. So when I was shooting for fun, the LAST thing I wanted was all that crap to tote around. Super-8 was the way to go, baby.

I had a lot of fun with my camera. I don’t remember the model number now, but it was a gorgeous Minolta that I picked up for an unbelievable price at a yard sale. See, the guy who owned it thought it was broke, but it turned out that the shutter just wouldn’t “dry fire” - there had to be a film cartridge in it for the shutter to work. It had loads of bells and whistles, and I used it for all sorts of stuff: animation and screwy time-lapse movies, vacation “snap shot” footage; I even did things like bolt the camera under the front bumper of my car and shoot a roll of film to see what it would look like. Some buddies and I built an underwater housing for it and we played with it in the river, the health club pool, and a jacuzzi or two.

For all the screwing around I did with that camera, you’d think I’d have gone to film school after high school, but it was not to be. The camera got put aside and by the time I remembered I still had it, film was hard to find (and sound film was just a memory.) I ended up selling it on eBay six or seven years ago, for WAY more than I’d paid for it.

3

Certainly. Mostly home movies and the occasional short animation. I’ve got loads of cameras, but my favorite is my Canon 1014e.

Where are you buying it? Even with a healthy markup, it should be no more than $15. Direct from Kodak is more like $11, less if bought in lots of ten or with a student ID (not just film student–any kind will do). This is plain old Kodachrome, if you’re talking about the Vision2 negative stock, that’s is more.

I love Kodachrome because of its extremely fine grain and how it very closely replicates the colors of old three-strip Technicolor movies–so vivid and saturated. Plus, well stored, it lasts damn near forever. Can’t say that for many other color stocks.

It’s said (rumor still, but this one has a good deal of credence to it) that Ektachrome 100D will be released in Super 8 this year to replace the old VNF film that was discontinued last year.

Pre-striped film is no longer made, but it can still be sound-striped after processing. If you’ve got a Weberling or similar striping machine you can do it yourself, or you can send it to businesses that offer the service. Then you can record onto it from your projector or editor.

If what everyone says is true, Super 8 is making something of a comeback. It’s nowhere near what it was in the '70s, but it is steadily climbing out of the bottomless pit it fell into in the '80s.

I’ve also got 8mm cameras that I use from time to time, a few 16mm cameras that are seldom ever touched, and an 80 year old hand-cranked 35mm camera that I use once or twice a year when the whim strikes.

4

My nephew’s girlfriend handed me a camera and said, " I think there is film in this, can you have it developed? "

Its Kodachrome II super 8 film. I don’t even know where to take it these days. Ideas??

I haven’t’ shot any of it in many years, not since film school ( early 1980’s ),. but I agree- it has a lush color and grain that’s pretty darned tasty on a shoestring budget.

Cartooniverse

5

I was going from memory, and I didn’t really remember how much it was. Might have been closer to $15, or even less. The last super-8 stock I bought, I got from Bel Air Camera in Westwood.

Yeah, the colour is great! I have some home-transfers of super-8 footage, and it doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing. I have my dad’s regular-8mm films, and the colours are still incredible after 50 years. I mean, this stuff was shot well before I was even born, and the colour still has excellent saturation. I remember a red shirt in particular on one of the filme whose image is still vibrant.

Yale Labs in North Hollywood processes super-8. They show $14/roll for processing.

Incidentally, they sell super-8 stock as well. Ektachrome 7240 is $19/roll, so buy it from Dusty’s sources! :wink: They also offer B&W and negative film.

I played with the Beaulieu 5008.S a little today, but didn’t put any film through it. :slight_smile:

6

Correction: Colour processing is $20/roll.

7

I have a good friend who still has and uses super-8.

But the coolest thing is he has several super-8 versions of Hollywood feature films. Apparently, there was a large enough market of home film makers and projectors that the studios used to print and sell mainstream films (drasticly edited down) on super-8.

I particularly liked the super-8 version of Alien. It ran about 20 minutes total – I’m thinking that was about all you could fit onto a single reel for most home systems. It was really, really funny (well, it sure was when we were stoned). There’s an alarn, they land, face hugger jumps guy, pops out of his chest 5 seconds later, and starts chomping on the crew. It really cut to the chase.

There’s a lot of Hollywood movies that could be improived by editing down to fit on a single super-8 reel.

8

Man! That’s so cool! I’d love to see something like that!

I think that Super 8 is great, and I’ve shot some home movies with them

They are all great, really because the problem with video is that you get so much. I mean really, does anyone want to watch 2 hours of Jimmy’s birthday party? Not me, and it will never get watched, but when you want to watch Super 8 home movies, there’s no annoying voices :smiley: and everything is so pretty, plus people will really act out for the camera if they know its going to be so short. And it makes viewing bearable.

But what is it about film that is so great? I don’t know, honestly, but it looks great to me, and I think it will be a shame if we replace it totally at some point. I’ll be very sad if you can’t see a movie projected from a 35mm projector. Plus it offers superior resolution than a lot of digital projectors.

But what some people say is that a given film has X resolution because it has been tested, etc, but moving film has a higher percieved resolution than a single piece. This is because film grain is distributed differently in each and every single frame. So if you take a digital camera and film something, each pixel is always in the same place. But with film, you have two pieces of film each being of the same “general resolution” but they each reveal different parts of the picture due to the uneven distrobution of the grain, so if you combine the two, you get a higher resolution. Obviously persistance of vision is important, as that one frame of film can only be in your eye for a short period of time, but this is something that is really cool. Maybe this is another reason why film is so nice?

I rarely use mine anymore though. Its too expensive for me, and I don’t want to pay for the equipment at the moment, but I plan on using it some day. I had some small cheapo camera i bought for 5 dollars at the salvation army. It was really tiny, but it did the job!

Digital filming just doesn’t interest me on any kind of professional level. I know there are options out there that offer great contrast, but there is just something in me that likes film. Projected film just seems so realistic to me.

But in the end they are both artifical means of capturing and projecting light. It doesn’t seem impossible that one day that digital technology could surpass any inherent benefit of film, but from what I saw of Lucas’s Star Wars film that was digital, it wasn’t impressive.

9

…Well, as long as I’m in here, the motel chain seems to be okay, too.

:o

:frowning:

10

Kodachrome II is K-12 (I think) process. The dyes for it no longer exist, Kodak discontinued them in 1976, so it can now only be processed as B&W. There are probably several labs that do it, but Rocky Mountain is the one it seems everyone uses, http://www.rockymountainfilm.com/. If I were you, I’d do it myself since they charge a lot for it. Get a high-contrast developer like D-19, some fixer, and a bucket–that’s really all you need for B&W. Modern Kodachrome is K-14. There are three labs worldwide that do K-14 (be it Super 8, 8mm, 16mm, or slides): Dwayne’s in Kansas, Kodak’s in Switzerland, and another in Japan that I know little about–probably Fuji’s lab, they have a similar stock in their Single 8 film line.

They still do, actually.

You can buy lots of used ones from eBay, but they’ll mostly be in fair to poor condition with severely faded colors (although occasionally one will surprise you, I’ve got a pristine copy of Raiders of the Lost Arc from eBay). For newly printed digests as well as full-lengths, you can get them from Derann, http://derannlists.co.uk/derann/super8mm.php. Be prepared, they’re not cheap (this isn’t a change, though–they were always very expensive). Just glancing through their current catalogue, a full length print of Independence Day is $770 and a 17 minute digest of the Mines of Moria scenes from The Lord of the Rings is $100. Both are color, in anamorphic widescreen, and have stereo sound tracks.

I really like digests. They’re usually cut to around either 10, 20, or 40 minutes (200’, 400’, and 2x400’, respectively). Some movies shorten better than others, though. I’ve seen a 20 minute version of Lawrence of Arabia that made absolutely no sense whatsoever–they even had to add a narrator to explain the sudden jumps in the story.
I usually just shoot K40 or Plus-X, or Tri-X if I’m doing an animation. It’s cheapest bought straight from Kodak, but I usually get it online from B&H Photo since it’s more convenient that way for me.

11

I have that. I also have two Star Wars reels. I edited them together (totally destroying the collector value, of which there was none at the time) to make a 40-minute version of the film. Unfortunately, the sound levels from the two reels are different. I’ve got a four-reel (80 minute) version of the original King Kong, a 20-minute Logan’s Run, and a five-minute version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Might have one or two more, but if I do I don’t know the titles.

[quote=Boyo Jim]
Apparently, there was a large enough market of home film makers and projectors that the studios used to print and sell mainstream films (drasticly edited down) on super-8.*
People had been making ‘home movies’ since at least the '30s, usually in 16mm in the early days. 8mm brought the price down enough for more people to make them. In the mid-1960s we got super-8. Not only was super-8 easier to load than 8mm (sometimes called ‘double-8’ because you loaded 16mm film into the camera, shot half of it, and turned it over to shoot the other half – and the loading was done in the same way as with 16mm cameras, with the threading and such), but they made the sprocket holes smaller so that they could put a larger image on the same 8mm-width film.

The upshot was that there were a zillion people out there with 8mm and super-8mm projectors. People had bought prints and edited prints of films on 16mm, so why not make them available on 8mm and super-8? (I have a decidedly un-PC cartoon on 8mm called Little Black Sambo.) In the days before VCRs (up until the early-to-mid-1980s most people didn’t have them) buying edited versions of films was the only way people could see them at their leisure. I remember that I bought my super-8 edited versions at K-Mart, they were that popular. (I bought King Kong in London.) Interestingly, my dad’s old 8mm films shot in the 1950s still have excellent colour; but the commercially-bought films seem to have suffered a bit of red shift.

I’d never thought of that! Do you have a cite? Not that I don’t believe you. It sounds plausible, but I’d be interested in reading more about it.

12

I have that. I also have two Star Wars reels. I edited them together (totally destroying the collector value, of which there was none at the time) to make a 40-minute version of the film. Unfortunately, the sound levels from the two reels are different. I’ve got a four-reel (80 minute) version of the original King Kong, a 20-minute Logan’s Run, and a five-minute version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Might have one or two more, but if I do I don’t know the titles.

People had been making ‘home movies’ since at least the '30s, usually in 16mm in the early days. 8mm brought the price down enough for more people to make them. In the mid-1960s we got super-8. Not only was super-8 easier to load than 8mm (sometimes called ‘double-8’ because you loaded 16mm film into the camera, shot half of it, and turned it over to shoot the other half – and the loading was done in the same way as with 16mm cameras, with the threading and such), but they made the sprocket holes smaller so that they could put a larger image on the same 8mm-width film.

The upshot was that there were a zillion people out there with 8mm and super-8mm projectors. People had bought prints and edited prints of films on 16mm, so why not make them available on 8mm and super-8? (I have a decidedly un-PC cartoon on 8mm called Little Black Sambo.) In the days before VCRs (up until the early-to-mid-1980s most people didn’t have them) buying edited versions of films was the only way people could see them at their leisure. I remember that I bought my super-8 edited versions at K-Mart, they were that popular. (I bought King Kong in London.) Interestingly, my dad’s old 8mm films shot in the 1950s still have excellent colour; but the commercially-bought films seem to have suffered a bit of red shift.

I’d never thought of that! Do you have a cite? Not that I don’t believe you. It sounds plausible, but I’d be interested in reading more about it.

13

Sorry, this is just something I remember from my Super 8 days about 2 years ago. I read it on some Super 8 enthusiast website. As it turns out though, when you google “percieved resolution” it talks about compression and what people are doing with their DV cameras etc… But I read this from some Super 8 source back then.

:frowning:

But really, it makes sense to me, and is at the very least responsible for something that makes film special. If it makes you happy, I seem to remember it passing my BS detector at the time.

Obviously there could be a resolution high enough to mimic film, but now it isn’t high enough. I remember reading about some cinemas in the UK that were going to project digital film at 2000x1000 (something along those lines, obviously) but really that is not nearly good enough. Especially over such a big screen.

14

I hope I didn’t come off as :dubious:. It’s just that what you posted had never occurred to me, and I was curious about it.

15

A Bolex 16 Pro came up on eBay. That’s a rare camera, and I remember reading that Lenny Lipton wrote something about it; so I pulled out Independent Filmmaking by Lenny Lipton (© 1972/1983) to read about it. Ah, yes. That’s what he said. ‘Weird and awkward.’

Next to this book on the shelf was Lipton on Filmmaking (© 1979). I bought this book for a film class, and I was very excited to get it. This was in 1981, and everybody used super-8 cameras. Why not read it? Should be good for a laugh. After the introduction, the book starts out with Polavision…

Yup. That’s what happened. Super-8 was never a ‘professional’ format. And why should it be? ‘Back in the day’, you didn’t rent videos to watch on your television. You saw movies projected on a screen. Super-8 is too small to blow up for the big screen (except for some limited stylistic things, such as in Natural Born Killers). You need 16mm, minimum.

Super-8 looks good when professionally transferred to video (Rank-Cintel process). Sure, close-ups look better than wide shots when transferred; but even wides are acceptable. Super-8 could have been a nice medium for no-budget filmmakers wanting to go directly to video. But a good production still takes money. Most people would rather shoot on 16mm. Consumers wanted something cheap to take pictures of Baby’s First Steps, and video was a lot cheaper. Super-8 was out of the home movie market, and too small for the professional market.

Still, there are professional-level super-8s out there. There are photos of Lipton using a Beaulieu 5008.S in his book. It makes me want to shoot a project on my 5008.S Multispeed.