Super 8 Projection Accessories

[Rob Young]

Ah, the Craven Backwinder...I still have mine here somewhere.

Solid metal construction and by a reputable company...absolutely couldn't get mine to work properly!

As a budding Sam Raimi back in the 80's, I was making a fright movie based in a local forest. One of my cunning shots was to be a transparent skeleton rising up from the forest ground.

So I took a new roll of Kodachrome and shot 6 seconds of the forest plate, then took it out and kept it for later...

My mum worked at the local hospital, so we borrowed a full size plastic skeleton and hung it up in the front room (the trip home with it in the passenger seat of the car was fun too).

Next, I covered the rest of the room in black cardboard and brightly lit up the skeleton.

Now to put the cartridge in the miracle backwinder and careful roll it back 6 seconds, counting the frames precisely. Finally, superimpose a shot of skelly rising up by tilting the camera down onto him for 4 or 5 seconds.

My huge excitement when the yellow envelope arrived back was soon dashed. There was the forest... a second or two went by...there was still just the forest...another couple of seconds...and then finally, skelly appears...just as the white frames appear as the cartridge was taken out...and there he still his, in his blackout out room before the next shot of action.

Yup, the backwinder didn't backwind 6 seconds, just one.

As Claus said, pushing super 8 backwards into that cartridge was never going to work flawlessly. I did use the backwinder again with mixed results, but certainly a super 8 accessory I could have lived without!

[Joerg Polzfusz]

According to the manual, those backwinders don’t work at the beginning and at end of a cartridge.

[Steve Lee]

Is it me, or were these film rewinders as much use as a fart in a spacesuit ?

Surely to use one you need to remove the film cartridge from the camera and place it into one of these rewinders, at the same time exposing it to light. Then after it has tried to push the film in the opposite direction to which it is meant to run, nicely consertinaring it up inside, you then need to expose it to the light again in order to place it back into the camera.
So you end up with your supposed seamless crossfade needing to be spliced at both ends in order to remove to two exposed parts of the film. Just pointless.
To make this work you would also need to slowly fade out and fade in the exposure to compensate the for the crossfade, otherwise you end up with a double overexposed film.

The very last camera I owned was a Elmo Super 1018R. This camera had this feature built in. I remember using it once, but after the noise it emitted while trying to rewind the film, I desided never to use it again.

[Joerg Polzfusz]

There are darkbags to prevent the exposal to light. And these rewinders allow longer rewinds than the in-camera-feature. The in-camera-feature basically only allows crossfades. The rewinders allow e.g. double exposures of titles.
(Nevertheless, once you have played around with Single8 or DS8, you can only laugh about this design-flaw of the Super8-cartridge.)

[Thomas Dafnides]

I think the Fujica Single 8 cartridge design is what Kodak should of introduced Super 8 to begin with....what were they thinking? I guess some cartridge they could patent ... what a blow to film-making.

[Rob Young]

Have to agree with all the points above!

I did once borrow a Braun Nizo super 8 camera which was a beautiful thing with a fabulous Schneider lens.

It had auto cross fade built in. You just pressed a button and it closed the aperture, stopped and rewound the film to the start of the fade then opened the aperture when you started filming again.

it did work beautifully every time.

[Brian Harrington]

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.

That's an FP pictured (I have one) -- not sure if it will work with an FP-A, B or C. You would also need a reel-to-reel tape recorder -- not sure if that had to be an Elmo, too.

Wow, you really had to jump thru hoops to get synced sound (did Rube Goldberg work for Elmo?) -- what an elegant solution sound-on-film is/was!