Sarah Beauchemin

Oh, wow - this gives a pretty interesting history of the contexts in which the Portapak was used during the late 60s / early 70s: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/portapak-camcorder-brief-history-guerrilla-television "In 1968, with the arrival of the first truly portable video rigs (the half inch, reel to-reel CV Portapak), video freaks could hang out with drug-tripping hippies, sexually liberated commune dwellers, cross-country wanderers, and yippie rebels, capturing spontaneous material literally on their doorsteps. During the summer of 1968 Frank Gillette taped a five-hour documentary of street life on St. Mark's Place in New York City, unofficial headquarters of the Eastern hippie community." This is just what I'm looking for!

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful and thorough answers. Very much appreciated. Brian and Andrew, I didn't even know that Portopak existed - super cool. That might be an even more compelling solution for my character than a 16mm . . . Really appreciate your help, all!

Thanks very much for your help, Phil! I feel that the 16mm camera might be the way to go. Do you know of a popular model that I could reference? My character is wealthy, so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for him to own an expensive camera that would use a 400 ft reel. Even 10 minutes would probably be enough for my scene to realistically take place. The scene would also be occurring indoors at night, but with an overhead light on, so the room would be reasonably well-lit. There would also be music playing, which I think would provide a good explanation for why the camera went unnoticed in the room. Thanks for pointing out the bit about audio being absent on the film, too!

Hi everyone, I'm a writer doing research for a character in my novel, set in 1971. I'm wondering if there were any home movie cameras in existence during that time that had reels that filmed longer than 3-4 minutes at a time. Basically, I'm trying to write a scene where the character leaves a camera running on a table (somewhat inconspicuously) and it captures a rather shocking event. But in order for this scene to make sense, the camera would need to be recording for at least 20 minutes. My initial research has revealed that there were several popular handheld 8mm movie cameras that year, such as the Kodak M22, but most of them used standard 50 ft reels that could only capture 3-4 mins of action. I did see that there are 7" reels (400 ft) that could record upwards of 25 minutes. But these reels are huge, and I imagine not many consumers owned cameras large enough to run these reels, right? They were more film studio cameras? (And such cameras certainly wouldn't be very inconspicuous in a room, I'm guessing). Thanks in advance for your help! Cheers, Sarah