8mm Forum: Of High School, Tape Splices and Ektachrome

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Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on November 17, 2013, 08:12 PM:

If been on a project these last few months of taking films I made the first few years I was in Super-8 (1978+) and bringing them up to standards to start showing them again. This means going through and remaking splices, adding black leader at the heads and tails, putting them in cardboard storage boxes hoping to avoid vinegar syndrome and labeling them too.

There is one I made in my senior year in High School in my Electronics class (4 hours a day five days a week: we were close.). I promised the guys I would show it in class the last day, so to speed up editing I tape spliced the whole thing. At the time I told myself "I'll resplice with cement one of these days". I'm 51 now and 33 years out of high school: "one of these days" turned out to be yesterday.

This was actually kind of an experiment in the long term durability of cement spices and Ektachrome film.

The tape splices held up better than I had any expectation. There was no spreading at all. The only thing is these were done on the tape splicer of a Baia editor, which cuts the film on a double curve. They were taped on only one side and in a number of cases that leading point on the downstream piece of film caught on something and snapped off. If they were cut straight and taped double sided, I might not have respliced at all.

These were filmed on the old Ektachrome 160G film, and I was concerned about fading. Nothing to worry about: the color is just as good as ever, despite not being kept in archival conditions by any stretch (just normal room temperatures). Following the end of Kodachrome, I've been concerned how my new films on 64T and 100D will hold up. If these look as good when I'm 84 as this one does at 51, all I hope is I'm still capable of enjoying them!

The movie itself? -bunch of young guys headed off to college, just being high school kids in those great last few days. Some graduated from college, some didn't. Most got married, a few of them a couple of times. Hairlines are certainly further up and waste lines more ...abundant in many cases. If mine are any indication, joints are certainly less willing at times. One healthy looking young guy's daughter came to the 30th reunion in his place because he passed away a few years before.

For myself, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. I'm pleased to say everything I'd hoped for turned out OK, and even more I hadn't even considered yet.

Those were bright, optimistic days: and I have the film to prove it too!

Posted by Maurice Leakey (Member # 916) on November 18, 2013, 02:47 AM:

Back in the sixties I made the wrong decision to use Gevacolor for my standard 8 shooting purely because it was cheaper than Kodachrome.

My cheese paring idea has now given me poor faded pinky colour films, whereas all my earlier Kodachrome films are as good (in colour) as the day that they were returned from Kodak.

Posted by Guy Taylor, Jr. (Member # 786) on November 18, 2013, 03:43 AM:

You and I are about the same age Steve, I'm 50. High school, especially my senior year, was definitely the best of times.

Posted by Graham Ritchie (Member # 559) on November 19, 2013, 04:34 PM:

Its really amazing looking back at old home movies, for the most part I used Kodachrome 40 and the colour still looks great. The images look "so alive" as if it was all shot yesterday.

I did my own striping back then and still have some film where, for a couple of seconds the stripe will wiz across the screen "look there goes the sound track [Cool]

" when I accidently bumped it during striping, I never did fix it.

Graham.

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on November 19, 2013, 09:11 PM:

The high school film started with some pretty grand ideas about how I was going to title it, so it would tell a story. The way it turned out was basically just a window into what went on in school.

With what I've learned about filmmaking since then I bet I could come pretty close to finishing it, bt it's a relic of it's time so I left it as it was.

Posted by Tom Hardwick (Member # 4010) on November 20, 2013, 03:29 AM:

I bought a Fuji Super-8 tape splicer in about 1983 along with the dedicated adhesive rolls of perforated tape. This very cleverly applies an 8mm wide 2 frame patch to one side of the film and a 2 frame patch between the sound stripes on the other side.

It's as invisible a splicer as I've found, although the Wurker can match it at a far higher cost per splice. Thing is these splices are much more reliable (and far less visually and aurally intrusive) than the cement Kollmatic that I used for a good few years.

So tape rules in my book, which amazes me when you see how little surface area is involved in the patch.

tom.

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on November 20, 2013, 09:18 AM:

I have the same experience as Maurice regarding Gevacolor that I shot in the 1950's - all turned pink. It was quite a bit cheaper than Kodachrome but could not match Kodachrome's brilliant colors, having a more pastel look.
All my Kodachromes from 60 years ago show zero fade. Thank you Kodak!

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on November 20, 2013, 11:04 AM:

The History Channel has a series called "WWII in color". The footage is stunning, and obviously Kodachrome.

-then again they colorised a bunch of footage once and did "WWI in Color". It wasn't quite the same...

Back when I first started making films Ektachrome 160G was basically the universal stock. It worked everywhere from daylight to room light. A lot of people never used Kodachrome for this reason.

K-40 was always my favorite, followed by Plus-X and 100D.

Posted by Graham Ritchie (Member # 559) on November 20, 2013, 04:47 PM:

I didn't use much Ekatchrome 160, but it was excellent in low light. I used a couple of rolls on a wet wintery night in the centre of the city. I was really pushing it light wise, but the results were amazing....really really good. The camera was a Canon 512XLE...and I still use it.

I think Kodachrome40 had a finer grain than the 160,so I used K40 most of the time. I wish they still made it, it was a nice film.

Tried out for the first time, a scan on the back cover "Super8 Filmaker" 1977 adding a blue border... [Roll Eyes]

Posted by William Olson (Member # 2083) on May 25, 2018, 10:32 PM:

Back in the early to mid-70s, my friends and I made lots of super 8 films. We even did a few with synchronized sound - using a silent camera, a tape recorder, having a lab stripe the finished film, I then dubbed the audio on my Elmo ST-800. What a job that was! I still have all the films and audio tapes. Despite being in the business of transferring other people's home movies, I never transferred my own. I hope to rectify that.

Posted by Tom Photiou (Member # 130) on May 26, 2018, 01:09 AM:

we shot several rolls of film over our years, one was an effort of a film made with many friends and was our one and only huge effort at a serious film during ww2 back in 1982. 600ft of film ended up edited onto a 400 and every tape slice has held up very well.
We used the 4 frame quick splice tape cut into two frames and have done that up until the beginning of this year where i finally bought a cir. [Wink]

Posted by Joe Taffis (Member # 4) on May 26, 2018, 08:40 AM:

Good thread Steve
Kodachrome 40 and Ektachrome 160 were the silent and sound cartridges I used the most, along with some of the cheaper options back in the 1960s through the 80s. Kodak color and B&W processing were always very nice as opposed to the generic processing from my local supermarket. I remember one stock in particular that was very thin. I guess it was polyester (?)
Also have to say I was lucky to find a Ciro two frame splicer early on; and the tape splices have held up great after all these years [Smile]

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on May 26, 2018, 08:57 AM:

Back at the time I made this film my favored splice was an overlapped cement splice: half a frame gets the emulsion scraped off and it is cemented over a frame of the joined cut.

I did this for years until I made a couple of films that were going to get sound striped. EVT magnetics wanted beveled cement splices so I had to sit on E-bay for a couple of weeks and get a Bolex beveled splicer.

This splice is a tiny, sloped cut through the film at the frame line on both ends and a cement join on these matching slopes. The splices are invisible, flat and dead quiet running through the gate. They are quite reliable if done right, but a little bit of an art. They also generate a lot of dust and you need to wipe the area of the splice after each one or you'll have a snow storm on screen. It's good to clean the splicer often too.

The tape splices I had on this film were obviously very durable, but they were downright awful on screen! They were pretty much the severed halves of two frames in the gate at the same time.

I can see how a tape splice that managed to cut along the frame line would be nice.

Posted by Bill Brandenstein (Member # 892) on May 30, 2018, 07:31 PM:

For all of the box warnings that color dyes may, in time, change, the Kodak stocks have indeed done remarkably well. I always thought the 160 looked fuzzy and way to grainy, but I think the aperture on my cheap camera couldn't cope with sunlight and that stock. And, of course, most of it was NOT in sunlight.

My quandary is that all of my editing was done with Kodak Presstapes, which are durable enough to probably survive something nuclear, since they're 6 miserable frames long. (Yep, cockroaches and Presstapes will be all that's left after a nuke. Picture that.) So if I were to redo splices, it would clean up those horrendous 1/3 second messes. The problem is getting them off of the film. That adhesive tears off its plastic base and is as indestructible as an adhesive can be. Pretty impressive after 40 years, honestly.

Posted by Brian Fretwell (Member # 4302) on May 31, 2018, 02:47 AM:

Even the Ekatchrome 40 (which was not around for long) had more grain then K40. I believe they made it so that it could be cut into E160 without a colour/contrast shift as you would get with K40.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on May 31, 2018, 11:42 AM:

Steve ...

You're post warms the heart!

When i was in high school, I took the "media" class and luckily, Dale Klitz, (the teacher, who was actually rarely in the class), had an "inside guy" with the local movie theater, and brought in lots of old 16Mm trailers as well as a few 35MM ones, and i would spend many a happy time splicing these trailers onto reels together, with a was allowed to bring home!

The class was "officially" designed to keep the 16MM projectors working, (this was back in the early 80's when they were still using 16MM), but we pretty much goofed off in the class, but boy! It WAS FUN!!!'

Bless you, Mr. Klitz! [Smile]

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on May 31, 2018, 12:02 PM:

When I was in 11th grade and a brand new filmmaker, the Camera Club got it in their head to make a Super-8 film and I joined immediately.

Unfortunately this was the Adviser's idea and the still-photography orientation of the members rebelled against the idea.

-We never shot an inch of film, but maybe I actually wound up doing that film all on my own in my Senior year.

How you see these things changes so radically depending on the point of view you have sitting in front of the screen. When I was a 17 year old with a movie camera, Mom and Dad were roughly 40: healthy and actually youthful. They had always been there and of course they always would be. Seeing them on screen was just what you'd expect: of course they are there! It was like looking out the window and seeing the sky!

These days I see those same films and they drift into frame quite a lot, it just pushes me back into my seat!

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