The Finished Film...

Below is my finished super 8 film for this advanced negotiated project...

I am fairly pleased with the outcome of it however at one minute twenty-five, it is a lot shorter than originally planned. This is due to a couple of reasons. Firstly when initially filming outside, or when I thought I was filming outside, a lot of the footage clearly wasn’t exposed when the film returned from processing. My only explanation for this was that the camera was not catching the sprockets on the film, and therefore the film was not winding on at the time of filming. The problem is that the timer on the camera corresponds to the camera rolling and not the film. So I thought I was filming a lot more than I actually was, and because of this I’m missing quite a few scenes originally planned in the shot list.

Another reason why there is a lack of footage is that the scenes exposed onto film were a lot shorter thank intended. The clips are quite short as action was taking place before the camera was feeding the film at full speed. The lengths of the footage were also affected by the batteries in the camera, which were low and should have been replaced prior to shooting. This fluctuated the frame rate of the camera, making some clips longer than desired, and others shorter than wanted.

The other problem with the footage when it returned was that a lot of the footage was under exposed and unusable. There were some clips that were shot at a bowling alley, adding another scene to the film but the camera and film just couldn’t find enough light to correctly expose the footage. The lens on the model of camera I was using was not interchangeable and therefore I was unable to use a lens with a lower f/stop. The only way this problem could of been overcome was to use a lower frame rate on the camera. But judging how under exposed some of the images were, even shooting at 18 frames per second would have produced under exposed images.

Therefore the main reason for the problems with under exposure was a lack of light in the environments used. The footage was shot on a fairly cloudy day and anything filmed indoors was far too dark to use. Consequently the biggest mistake in the production of this super 8 film was a lack of attention to lighting.

Aesthetically I am very pleased with the footage. Even though as previously mentioned the footage was shot on a very overcast day, the colours in some of the shots are very vivid and live up to the high contrast nature of super 8 film. I also think that the organisation and selection of shots correspond to the narrative well, and capture the theme of nostalgia; a theme originally intended to be achieved in the aims of this film prior to filming.

As I’ve stated, the major flaw of this production is the length, however this is a risk taken when filming super 8. In this case it was using the best of the three minutes of footage that came back after processing, but unfortunately in this instance only fifty percent of the three minutes of footage were good enough to use in editing the film.

If I were to re-produce this film I would have filmed on multiple super 8 films to have a wider scope of footage to play about with in editing. Some might say a digital copy should have been filmed in conjunction with the super 8 footage as a back-up however that is something I never intended to do as I wanted to make a super 8 film, not a digital replication of super 8.

I feel as if this project has summed up what super 8 is all about. Its one big risk, because if you get it wrong, you can have paid out a lot of money and achieved nothing from it. However if done correctly, what you can get back can be very rewarding. Both of these circumstances apply to my work as there was a fifty percent cut between what was good and what was bad.

The apprehension in not knowing what your footage will come back looking back is a nervous experience and I feel the practice of super 8 makes a better film maker, as you become a lot more careful in what you shoot and sparing with our film, in contrast to the un-limitless memory of digital film.