Rick Palidwor

Any one on this board live in Calgary Alberta? Sleep Always, an 81 minute drama which we shot in "super-duper 8" (widescreen) is screening at the CSIF Sofa Cinema, 2711 Battleford Ave SW, November 5, 7pm. There will also be a program of super 8 shorts on Saturday November 6 and a panel discussion on that afternoon. If you are out there please check it out. For more info on Sleep Always and super-duper 8 visit our site: www.friendlyfirefilms.ca Cheers Rick

Are you looking for that special R8/R10 remote which plugs in on the lower side of the body? Those are rare but turn up on ebay now and again. Or are you just wanting to run the camera from a cable? In that case any standard mechanical cable release will work. I suspect you are looking for the special one but thought I would mention this. Rick www.friendlyfirefilms.ca

Try Film Rescue International. Whether they can turn it around for you in time depends where they are in their cycle. They only run a batch ever so often but you could get lucky. Rick www.friendlyfirefilms.ca

Actually we kind of like super-duper 8 and plan to continue using it (ultra super 8 doesn't do anything for me personally). It's one of those things that has been implemented by a number of different people so it seems to go by a number of names, though when I google ultra super 8 (or others I've heard, such as 8extra) I get nothing that would suggest it was in wide use, if used at all beyond these boards. Having said that, super-8-know-everything (and I mean that well) Martin W. Baumgarten informs me that: "It's also known as the Super 8-B format (B for the german word Breitwand, meaning Widescreen) as via its inventor Ruedi Muster of Muster Film & Video Technik in Switzerland. It's original inception is from conversion of the BOLEX H-8 and H-8 Reflex cameras, and then moved over to the cartridge loading cameras." So if there is any "professional" (i.e. camera manufacturer-derived) phrase for it it seems to be super 8-B, but in the meantime, whatever... Rick www.friendlyfirefilms.ca

We convert cameras for $50 though not all models can be converted. We also do transfers for $10-15 per roll depending on the project but as mentioned by others lots of places can transfer the wide frame so it probably depends what you are looking for and where you are located. We are in Toronto. We just converted a camera for a shooter in LA and he is about to send us a bunch of rolls. I'll ask him to post his opinion of the results to help others judge what to expect of our work. Rick www.friendlyfirefilms.ca

Downix mentioned Sleep Always briefly above but I thought I would take a moment to describe it further. We shot Sleep Always on Ektachrome VNF 7240 (now being discontinued, sadly) with widened-gate cameras (we call it super-duper 8). It's an 81 minute drama which played in a couple of festivals this past December (in Spain and New York) with hopefully a few more to come. There is lots of information on our website including a link to an article that appeared in Kodak's In Camera magazine last year. For German readers you can also find lots of information in the November 2003 issue of Schmalfilm magazine. We don't have a film print - it's a tape finish. Our DVD's were pressed from a glass master and are available to purchase from our site as well as http://www.moviemarkdvd.com and www.wittner-kinotechnik.de It's an extremely low-budget movie, partially thanks to super 8 origin but also in the way we approached it, but we like to think it looks pretty good. You can check our IMDb page where some viewers have posted reviews: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404434/ I wouldn't hesitate to shoot another feature on super 8 but the decision would be based entirely on the story and whether the super 8 look suits it. If I was expecting the movie to play on the big screen I would have second thoughts for sure, but theatrical release is such a different economic beast that we were never thinking of that - probably would have stopped us in our tracks. Because we were aiming for the small screen we didn't hesitate to shoot super 8 and we think it holds up well in that environment. Given the reality that most low-budget independents will never play the big screen, I am surprised more people don't consider super 8 for image capture. Cheers Rick www.friendlyfirefilms.ca

John is right. We've done a lot of super-duper 8 (widened-gate super 8) shooting and there is a risk that the "unprotected" edge of the film can be scratched in processing - we rigged a wet gate process into our telecine which made the scratch invisible. Rick www.friendlyfirefilms.ca