Super 8 Projection Accessories

[Brian Harrington]

None of my home movies my family took that I still have were edited, either. They couldn't be -- else most of the reels would be empty! Some really stink -- on a 200 foot reel, maybe a minute or 2 -- scattered across the reel -- are family -- the rest is nondescript scenery. One has "Disneyland" written on it - from the 50s -- barely any Disneyland footage -- and barely any family shown. Instead -- lots of "scenery" taken from the car window on the road!

While it does take some skill to take a snapshot -- it takes about 1,000 times more skill to take moving picture footage. That's why I don't know who the heck buys all those home movies on eBay.

Video-tape was a gamechanger -- for better or worse. That's why I laughed when I saw the Lipton book and read how complicated it was to sync sound to film -- and I'm still not sure why people did that when Super 8 cameras could record sound right on the soundstripe of the film in the camera.

And video-tape wasn't even new when it was marketed for retail sale. Makes you wonder why 8mm and Super 8 cameras lasted as long as they did.

I can picture a guy buying and using all that equipment Lipton talks about, while his neighbor shows him his new camcorder, "films" a few minutes, pops it into his VCR, and shows him the footage right away. I can imagine the look on the "film" guys face as he realizes how much money and time he wasted.

With technology, things progress and progress with small improvements along the way, then suddenly a completely different technology comes along to solve the same problem, but in a completely different way. Basically the original technology hit a brick wall for whatever reason. I had never heard of Polavision, but I guess it was the moving picture version of Polaroid. To me, that would have been an overly-complicated solution to the problem that camcorders solved. Did you have to peel off paper from a whole roll of film? lol --- KISS.

And while I of course prefer film, for home movies, video was a better solution for the masses. The problem is when it was introduced, up until today with iPhones -- the footage is no better than an early talkie shot in 1929!

[Steve Klare]

Polavision was cartridge-based and self-contained. At the time it was introduced, it may have been either too late or just never meant for success at any time. It financially hurt Polaroid and some say fatally wounded Eumig, who had developed the equipment and was ready to make a lot of it.

Yes, the average home-movie maker wasn't really big on making really good films. Mrs. "D" was so tolerant of bad exposure, focus, composition, continuity, and film handling that some of her "work" was kind of...abstract!

She filmed he Beatles off the TV when they were on Ed Sullivan and then double exposed them with her children splashing in the kiddy pool.

The Beatles in the Pool: just a messed up home movie or a work of Modern Art?!!

(-actually, one of her most-requested films! Wish I could see it now!)

There certainly was a time when people shot and projected film because it was the only game in town: if you wanted to have a memory of your kid's birthday party or watch Woody Woodpecker without waiting for him to be on TV, it was the only way to go whether you were "into film" or not.

These are the people that we "lost" when alternatives to film became available and from their point of view, it makes perfect sense!

Sports films used to be a big thing. Everyone that had them was into sports for sure, yet only some fraction were into the "film" part of it enough to stay around once they could VHS it.

Then again there were the...umm..."consumers" of adult films: who could pay attention to a projector at a moment like...that?!

-or just imagine you're some high-school Teacher and you want to show Romeo and Juliet to your 10th grade English class. You can borrow a Pageant from AV, wheel it a thousand feet to the elevator and then against a stream of distracted teenagers flowing in the opposite direction to get it to class, before even dealing with manual threading 6 reels of 16mm and then rewinding them. You can instead carry a single VHS tape in your briefcase and shove it into one of those VCRs they installed in every room last summer because they are so cheap now.

You're somebody with a job to get done and later-on you have a dozen downright awful term papers to mark too: you choose the medium!

The people here are the ones that want to be involved in the process: the kind of people that enjoy driving a stick shift or learning Morse Code or would rather make soup from scratch than just pour it out of the can and microwaving it. For us, it's not just the destination, it's the journey too!

(-fully understanding that there come days in everybody's life when 'canned soup' is exactly the right thing!)

There were certainly more film hobbyists back when you could buy Kodachrome at any supermarket than today, but way back when, we were nowhere near a majority of film users.

(ANY teacher at my elementary school could manually thread 16mm, but I'm guessing only a small minority of them actually loved doing it!)

[David Kilderry]

My dad shot slides mostly but had borrowed a Standard 8mm camera when I was young to shoot a home movie. Mostly encouraged by me, he bought a Super 8 sound camera in 1979. About a third of the films we shot were sound, the rest silent mostly due to cost. We knew quite a few people with Super 8 cameras, but we were the only ones we knew that had a Super 8 sound camera. It was a Sankyo Sound XL 420, I did not buy my first Canon until about 5 years later.

I used the projector sound recording facilities only a few times; for a school project doco (got an A+!) and for a short doco done for a friend.

[Graham Ritchie]

My first camera was a sound camera the Bell and Howell shown below, later I would move to a Canon 512XLE. I like all Canon, and still use a FTB for 35mm slides. The backbone of 8mm was always the baby on the lawn films, for those serious film makers out there, most likely would have moved onto shooting 16mm, although in saying that 8mm was used as well. The thing is, I find with our old home movies that when they are projected through a film projector they seem come alive, especially if you have used Kodachrome film. Your old home movies capture that family moment in time, that will never return again.

These days home movies can be made on your phone, but will they last?.



Todays world its this..

[Ken Finch]

What you are all saying about the majority of home movies is so true. However, the majority of the accessories mentioned were marketed for the benefit of amateur film makers. There were many dedicated amateur film making clubs using the narrow film gauges until very recently. Also quite a few who were lone workers. A few clubs still manage to exist but it is quite a struggle. Mainly because the formats change so rapidly.

[Shane C. Collins]

I shoot the current Super 8 Ektachrome 100D (7294) for a few reasons. First the look of the film itself, and for capturing those important moments that should last several generations. Because film is rather pricey today I choose to only use it for special occasions. Vacations, birthday, and other events. I try to only shoot scenes with people up close for better movies. And I try to keep the scenes moving along 5 to 10 seconds each. Current Ektachrome, in my opinion, is the sharpest Super 8 color reversal to date. Kodak vested lots of time and money to achieve a higher resolution film, and it shows on a high quality projector. But, as many of you have heard me preach before, this stock does need some tweaking of the exposure as your making movies, which is easy enough, and pays dividends in the end! Long live film!

[Brian Harrington]

(ANY teacher at my elementary school could manually thread 16mm, but I'm guessing only a small minority of them actually loved doing it!)

Not at mine. We sat through a whole 90 minute movie once where it kept losing the loop! Terrible. Another time, they put reel 2 on before reel 1. They apparently didn't know how to unthread the projector! It was weird watching the second half of a move, then the first half!

My high school biology teacher was better at it. He loved to show us those National Geographic films when he didn't feel like teaching that day. Then on other days he showed us slides of his most recent caving expedition! He hated being in school as much as we did!

[Steve Klare]

I sat in the right hand row in Bio, at the very back of the row.

The second row from the right was one desk shorter: that's where the projector and operator stood! For some reason I got the best seat in the house, especially as a pretty new film collector!

For some reason I'm still exploring, 16mm on a Pageant was just more of an event than VHS on a monitor!

Mine was a big 16mm school. I remember something like a dozen Pageants on steel carts in an "Audiovisual" room next to the library. I'm given to understand that a couple of years after I went to college that room became a computer lab. (To everything there is a season!)

[Brian Harrington]

By the time I was a senior in HS, my English teacher showed us HAMLET on tape -- with Laurence Olivier.

I'm pretty sure the 16mm films used in my schools were B&Hs. I remember them being green. It was back in school that I first got gauge-envy!

[Graham Ritchie]

Never saw a single 16mm projector or any other type of projector come to think about it, all the time I spent at schools, I don't think we ever had them to begin with.

[Melvin England]

We had 16mm films on occasions (except when I gave the school a screening of the film I made on the then recent school holiday to Austria on super 8).


The 16mm was normally during lessons and had a relevance to the subject we were studying. A lot of them were the Disney educational films. Stick Mickey or Donald on the screen and you get a captive audience was the theory, I think.

When this happened, I felt two emotions.....

A) Excitement as I was naturally turned on to film and projection.

B) Happiness and contentment as the film was a great cop-out from the normal boring lessons!


We did once have a full length 16mm film show after school. The film was "The Cross and The Switchblade" starring Pat Boone. It had a religious tone to it and was presented by the Gideon Society who had just issued us all earlier that week with our own pocket Bible. October 1975.

Never seen the film since.

[Claus Harding]

Among accessories, the cartridge rewinder was one of those objects one thought of with awe.
The ability to "rewind" (so to speak) the film and double- or triple expose it was just the thing when you were making your own sci-fi epic.
One was, of course, dimly aware of the challenge involved in bunching the film back up in the magazine with the winder, as Kodak's hallowed design simply wasn't engineered to roll backwards. But it worked, within reason, for some seconds of film. I still have mine...

[Douglas Meltzer]

Claus,

I recall seeing the ads for a similar device, the Craven Backwinder.



This is a later model:

[Douglas Meltzer]

To help this thread stay on topic, I've given the posts about the ACW Ten Best competitions a new home.

[Douglas Meltzer]

Here's a projection accessory that I picked up on eBay years ago. The Elmo Tape Sound FP allows you to synchronize Elmo's FP-A projector with a reel to reel tape recorder. I never had the FP-A to try it out.