Alessandro Machi

For doing a test roll, think of your camera as a still camera, and shoot each shot for about 7 seconds. However, you definitely want to evaluate if your lens holds focus from telephoto to wide angle, but don't get trapped into doing too many zooms as your roll will be gone before you know it. As long as you have a goal every time you frame a shot and shoot it for seven seconds, you will learn about your camera and the film you wish to use. I also recommend shots where you are closer to your object, and the camera lens is wide. If you get good results with those types of shots, it means you can shoot on location faster and with less set up time. However, that 10 to 1 zoom lens has many excellent applications, and you can quickly learn if your tripod is up to the task of keeping the camera steady when in telephoto mode. One of the safest, and fastest methods for doing on location exposure settings is to zoom in to the portion of the frame that matters most to you, then lock the internal automatic meter to the manual setting, then reframe (aka zoom out) for the shot you want. If you discover that every time you use this method your shots are underexposed or overexposed a similar amount, then simply compensating that exposure a certain amount should give you a quick run and gun method for the future.

Is it dangerous to be around kangaroos? Those legs must pack quite a punch from all of that bouncing. I liked the speed choice of 54 fps, I'm curious if you were exposed wide open because it looks like you metered for normal filming speed and when you switched to the 54, the meter did not compensate.

Did we establish how the film was being viewed before it was deemed "contrasty"?

The shot of the guy taking off his clothes while we see the girl in the mirror mimicking his every move was priceless.

The steadicam style of shot of the girl as she walks down the street, there is some type of intermittent reflection going on, it is very subtle but it is definitely there, how did that happen? Overall very nice footage. Some of the blacks near the end are slightly crushed, but that might have been vimeo doing the crushing.

How was the film actually "scanned". There appears to be a blue halo in some of the images and the wider images are pretty soft. I wonder if you can get a better result with the same piece of film if you alter some aspect of the transfer workflow. If you just transferred your film straight to betacam sp, it would look sharper I'm sure. I understand the idea is to have super-8 work within the HD aspect ratio, but if doing that gives one a softer image than going to betacam sp, then there probably is a better approach to take.

Your rumor reminds me of how Kodak chose to regionalize Kodachrome processing back in the early 90's. The overnight service dried up, and Kodak lost many industry professionals along with zealous amateur photographers who were used to 24 hour turnaround or faster. This also opened up a huge opportunity for Fuji as well. If true, this is probably one of those moves a Kodak bean counter makes to try and show savings even though it actually begins the process of more loss than profit. The sad part is some executive will probably get a huge bonus for coming up with this idea that will actually work out to a significant percentage of the alleged money that will be "saved". In late 2010, Barack Obama cut the Mississippi River dredging funding in half yet proclaimed in his 2011 state of the union address stated his goal of doubling economic exports. Sustained dredging allows for more water to pass down the river and could result in significantly less flooding, saving thousands of flooding victims the extreme financial loss. Cutting the federal dredging budget in half probably caused damage well above and beyond what was "saved", but the bean counter still gets credit with cutting the dredging budget and saving the government money, even if it is at the expense of the greatest economic hubway in the U.S.

Hi Ross, I don't know the exact shutter speed. However as a general guide, the shutter angle is around 150 to 180 degrees for 18 fps for most super-8 cameras. If the camera says XL on it, then the shutter angle is usually between 190 degrees and 220 degrees. On top of that, that bright viewfinder is a result of diverting some of the light from the film plane to the eyepiece. I don't know the exact amount of loss but I think 1/2 to 2/3's of a stop is a safe estimate to make.

You could do a really great spoofumentary with this group. They fund their music by robbing banks. Show them playing as they go into a bank to rob it. Have them talk about how they don't think they'll be caught because the music is so well liked....

That flash helped created a really ugly purple color on Sheen's face. I seriously thought he was gravely ill until I saw the picture below where he looked like he had regular color and was slightly greasy.

When I saw the first image in this article about Charlie Sheen, Mr. Sheen looked awful. When I scrolled down the page, I found an almost identical image of Mr. Sheen, the background is different but the clothing is the same, and Mr. Sheen looked much better. The difference appears to be that the top picture used a flash and the result was a desaturated image that was very unflattering whereas the second image was straight on regular lighting used during the actual featured interview. Here is a link to the article and the two images of Sheen.

Visually you are on solid footing. Soundwise, the voice over made me wince. Even if you were trying for an older "talkies" type of sound, the sound is distorted. Distorted sound is about the worst thing you can do on any film project. I also strongly recommend NEVER putting your text at 100% white level. I don't have a scope hooked up to my monitor but it looks to me like you are at 100% or close to it. Never go over 70%. You need flexibility in adjusting video levels just in case some situation comes up where you have to adjust the video levels. If you have 100% on your video, you can only go down, and therefore you have basically zapped your image so that it can't be adjusted upwards. Plus, 100% brightness for text will usually dominate over the visual anyways. Play around with 50% to 70%.

I found Nathan's newest endeavor here. It seems wasteful to me to just give up on older projects, especially when they might be able to help raise revenue for newer projects.

lol, it's probably Spielberg's actual camera that he used 40 years ago. However, I think they could have connected with kids nowadays by showing that even back in 1979, there were very cool looking cameras that helped make cool looking things specifically because they offered faster lenses and slower shutter times to capture images at night. The promo I saw happened at night. It just seems like a lost opportunity to not go with a cooler camera.

I think that is well put, but then this begs the question, why even call it Super-8?

Is it possible that Charlie Sheen was kept extra far away from the interviewer to make sure no Charlie Sheen spit landed on her?

It worked now. Absolutely Tremendous colors, the facial tones are spectacular. I wish you could have nailed the focus a little more often on the two actors. One of the aspects that you use so well here is being able to use the background groundscape as the actual background. Super-8 excels in this type of environment because the overall contrast of the scene is dramatically reduced when the greens of the ground become the actual background. Now about that focus...

I found the use of one of the most mundane, box like super-8 cameras ever made off putting. Ok, I think Kodak camera has a somewhat cool grip on it, but the camera itself is nothing to look at. Why not use a Canon 814-XLS with all the cool gizmo's and gadgets on it. Why not use a Eumig 881 with the silver body and the time-exposure / electric eye sensor feature to grab some really unusual frames. The film could have generated some more excitement by having the kids oogling a super-8 filmmaker magazine and foaming over the elite cameras. Instead, the super-8 camera can't be a co-star. It's just so typical of Hollywood to feel threatened by super-8 cameras to the point where they have to use an absolutely boring camera for the movie.

I tried the link and it gave an out of commission notice. The still looks pretty darn nice however.

Yeah, especially if Charlie "what's taking so long" Sheen was telling them he could light the shot in 30 seconds. I'm not saying he did that, but, the pre roll before they started the interview probably would be a hoot to see. Based on my limited understanding of how compression works, I bet the wide shot, if zoomed in to either person probably looked fine, but when zoomed out, it could not handle that level of contrast. Are there any analog HD cameras? I bet an analog HD camera would have handled the wide shot just fine.

I had the unfortunate happen stance of seeing clips of the same interview on television. What struck me immediately was that the image looked much less contrasty on standard def television. So, I'm thinking this is a continuation of the ongoing, never ending, battle between zero black and middle earth tones, aka maintaining the 7.5 IRE plateau as the true baseline black. So the lighting was made to look worse on the video clip provided by simply ratcheting down perfectly fine lighting work from 7.5 to zero black. I'm wondering if an additional contrast increase was done as well. No codec will work correctly on every lighting scenario that is possible. In this instance, the blacks were dropped by 7.5, but it also looks like the white level on the bright side was increased as well, which would help explain the blown out look of the forehead of the interviewer. Either that, or, the third camera, the wide shot, was simply a lock off that could not handle the dynamic range of the lighting. lol, my 15 year old betacam sp camera could have handled the dynamic range of the wide shot better than what I am seeing. The dropping of the black from 7.5 to zero would definitely have put a redder sheen on Sheen's face as well.

...and I've read that too much viagra can make faces redder. But beyond that, the wide shot is a study in what looks like poor lighting from a technical point of view but is probably effective for the interview that was conducted. Sheen comports himself like a man whose brain innards have been fried and he's literally living on the edge of what brain matter is still existing. from a technical point of view, it looks like they sacrificed soft lofting for a harsher, high grid lighting so they could show a real wide two shot with no lights anywhere to be seen. But look at what the result is in the two shot, the interviewer's clothed arms are blown out, Sheen's hands are blown out, the inteviewers forehead is blown out in the two shot as well. It also looks like the lighting on the interviewer is from a bigger light source, which could explain the nicer, softer look. Sheen's lighting is pretty minimal, as his darker clothing (again refer to the two shot) is virtually crushed to the point of loss in detail in the two shot. Is the light source for Sheen "too red", or is that Sheen himself that is too red. I don't know, but he's definitely too red.

I like Ben Stiller. I think he's a comedy genius.

If you ever need to see more examples of super-8 time-exposure work, you can check out 8mm-stockfootage.com I tend to avoid keeping the camera wide open if my goal is to capture lights moving by. I like to try and keep the lens looking sharper with more depth of field by never going below a 2.0 / 2.8 split. Ideally, I go with a 2.8-4.0 split at the minimum when I would shoot with kodachrome 40 and my time-exposures would be anywhere from 1 second up to 10 seconds, depending on what I was shooting and the framing I was using. With 200T, the sky is the limit as an f 5.6 is easily attainable with shorter exposure times.

Hey Nathan, I searched the super-8 forum archives to find a couple topics about your super-8 cities global documentary project. Hopefully you will be notified by email that a new comment was added to this topic. Check out this Economist documentary contest. Documentary winners end up on a PBS special.