Having a film made on super 8

[Scott Walker]

Hi all

is there someone out there with the ability to take a film and have it made in super 8 format with sound? If I were to want a feature film made on the format can someone help with that? It might involve getting the rights but I’m super interested. If so how does this process work? Can it be done from a disc or must it be done some other way? I’d be fascinated to know.

[Osi Osgood]

Scott, about the only way is to go to Andec, but to do so means you need to have a negative made first, very costly, and you have to have a print of the film on either 16mm or 35mm, preferably, 35mm. Each print run is on a 16mm, two super 8 prints, back to back, which are then slit into two seperate prints. Then, you have to get the mag striping done, another cost (yay, note sarcasm), and then, the last step is doing the magnetic recording. Very costly, but if you have the money to blow, go for it! If you want, perhaps attempt to make your money back, hopefully pick a film lots of other collectors will be interested in as well.

[Scott Walker]

Wow ok this is fascinating! Ok so I now have to ask, how expensive like what’s a good price estimate would you say? Obviously after having a print of the film on 35 or 16? It’ll probably be waayyy more than I could ever afford but I am interested to know. Fascinating. Thanks Osi

[Osi Osgood]

I have to admit that I do not know precisely. If Dave or Lee could chime in here, they could give you a better idea of an accurate price. When I released my first release, ( I say first, as I haven't lost hope that I could do more ), I happened to have a friend down in California, that actually had access to a still existing optical printer, and I was able to get made a 16 minute negative for 200 dollars. What also saved money, was that my friend was able to use leftover portians of raw film stock from television production, ( you could apparently get it at a bargain price), which also helped keep the price down. In our case, we also used a series of filters, in order to restore most of the color to a few of the commercials that were suffering from color loss. Then, it was off to Andec! While Andec made our test print, I had a local friend with a 16mm projector, project the film, while I recorded the audio on my minidisc recorder/ player, which then was transferred to CD, for recording the finished prints. Even though these were taken from 16mm, and though there would be some added grain in the overall process, I was highly impressed with how sharp the finished prints were, with a very acceptable grain level.

[Brian Fretwell]

I seem to remember that in the early 1980's it was thought that a minimum of 40-50 prints were needed to cover the set-up costs (Making the negative, test prints, etc) it may be different now.

[Scott Walker]

Wow. The process is fascinating for this to happen. Wonderful.

[Osi Osgood]

Another element of this process is patience! It is not a quick process, especially with folks like Dave, who have the extra step of actually editing the footage ahead of time, but I, like Dave, like Lee and Phil, Steve and a few others, can have the great satisfaction of having released brand new materials in this beloved and almost 60 year hobby of packaged super 8 film product!