Originally Posted by The Guru  814 & Nizo, two iconic super8 cameras!
It took me a couple of looks to get into "super8-mode", it's so rare to see, which is a huge pity. |
had no idea celluloid was still an option - but film is still made and cameras are available on the bay
the Nizo has a great lens and the 814 was solid and dependable, if more basic than the Nizo
In my opinion (notice that I don't do IMHO, nothing about me is humble) super8 looks magical when projected, yet loses that special something when transfered to video. I could imagine that your two films would be captivating when projected onto a screen and I don't think this comes across on the postage-stamp size of youtube. It's hard to say anything about the quality because I'm not sure if the loss of highlight detail in Avebury is due to overexposure (reversal film is very unforgiving), the cine-transfer, or the you-tube compression. |
good points: as you can see from the film dates - 2002/2006 - i was very iffy about loading these shorts to the web, and delayed till 2008, it has taken me that long to discover how to achieve a reasonable level of web quality for the films. Avebury started out in celluloid only, and was projected in a cinema club, then it was shown on a large screen, to an audience ~ dvd/digital projection - and was okay quality - no worries. Avebury was the first film i ever made, and i am experimenting with film stocks throughout; neither Kodachrome K40 and/or Kodak Ektachrome liked bright sunlight, i learnt the hard way round, hence the overexposure in bright conditions
I found Ridgeway more impressive somehow, although the images were technically much "softer" than Avebury. I think it's a real pity that I only saw the films on youtube, not in a projection theatre. There's a lot of work and effort gone into these films and it shows. The aesthetic of S8 can take a bit of getting used to and is very much a personal taste, a bit like Marmite, you either love it or hate it, I love it. |
thanks; i have never seen Ridgeway on the big screen, although it has been screened to an audience and appreciated - sadly i was not able to attend the event. Ridgeway was almost entirely a home project, apart from the film processing; it has been through many stages of digital processing, including anti-flicker filtering, and it is a miracle the digital film exists at all: mixing all those layers of dv processing does some pretty weird things to the resulting video file, which started to freeze all the computers working on it, in the latter stages of editing; even in the web edit i did, from disc, all hell broke loose, at one stage - again - down to the fact that there is so much going on in the file, i think - you can compare this 'tension' in the image to the 'Rhiw Bowl Stone' short on YouTube, which was aerial transferred to dv, without any 'special effects' filters, it is visually calmer; but i like the effects in Ridgeway, nonetheless, and it is a record of where i was at technologically, in 2006. yes, the films are story-boarded, at least, as a rough guide - i start out with a definite idea - but obviously i cannot really control the multiple exposure scenes in these films, they are filmed 'blind' because you cannot see the end result till it is processed, weeks or months later, if you are sending your film away
I really liked the way you used the characteristics of film, like the white noise of the television and the acceptance of grain in some shots. There's a mind-set about working with film which is lost when originating on video. Knowing that you've got three minutes of material and it's costing you thirty quid a roll tends to make you approach shots differently. There's also more of a feeling of "exposing" film when you can actually feel the camera whirring. |
the tv is a sort of in-joke at my own expense, with its flickering, and the lengths amateur filmmakers (c'est moi) must go to, in order to obviate this effect; it is also the record of an unbelievably hot, uncomfortable night in a motel, beside a major road, with articulated lorries droning by the open window; in the longer version there is actually footage of the M4 + lorries - since the Ridgeway is interrupted by the motorway, which cuts directly across it - today you must negotiate a lofty footbridge, to follow the ancient track. oh yes, shooting film concentrates the mind wonderfully, when an entire roll lasts but 2.5 minutes! :-o [lol]
Last weekend I met up with a friend who's been working on a super8 film for yonks. She's scanning in the film herself, on a frame by frame basis and putting it together in FCP... you don't get that sort of dedication nowadays... I moan if I have to digitise footage in real time! |
your friend might be using something different, but i know of machines that scan celluloid, one frame at a time - the ones i've heard of do this via some form of computerised scanner, so the process is probably quite automated, once you are satisfied with tonality, and so forth. i am about to start experimenting with a frame-by-frame technique, but this will be something different, called 'optical printing' - something i am looking forward to trying out. [i have edited on iMac software but not FCP - the worst thing i've encountered with Mac software, is that there are so many versions of the one basic video edit program]: FCP looks like the deluxe version, i would love to have a play with it!
The music was a bit Frippatronics for my liking but it fitted the images superbly. |
yes, thanks - the Ridgeway soundtrack technology was as involved as the film - so the two complimented one another, in more ways than one: it took me about a solid week of evenings to edit the soundtrack down, to fit the web video, whilst maintaining the audio intelligibility.
Edit: Let us know if you ever intend to project the films! |
yes indeed - i have a new(er) ciné projector now, which is an improvement on my old one - so there may well be a *non-virtual ciné evening* coming up, at some stage in the future?
bests
Ric