James Foster

Hi David, Wow, a very interesting use of the technique. Unfortunately I am away from my camera ATM but I will have a look through my Nizo 801 with some studio lights shone through a hole. I assume (though I may be wrong) that for an effect of round rings the aperture will have to be fully open in which case filming the sun would likely require the use of ND filters. I don't know enough about lens design but are the different rings and circles dependent on the different elements of different types of lens designs, as you say I can imagine that older lenses are more suited to this effect, I believe the Nizo is considered to be prone to flare so it might be a good option.

That would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much, J

Hi John, Extremely kind of you to offer, any of his Super8 films would be of immense interest to me although I'm not sure they would have been distributed on 16mm; as far as I understand (though I may be completely wrong) the originals were never reproduced before being scanned and it is the foundation that holds the scan video.

I saw some of Derek Jarman's Super8 films at the Close-Up cinema in London a few years ago and for me it was a highly influential viewing experience such that I am currently in the process of producing my first film largely inspired by Jarman's. Unfortunately I have been unable to gain any further access to these films. They are held by the LUMA foundation based in Arles, France and any correspondence I have made to them regarding any information on the films has gone without reply. Despite much public statement about preserving the works legacy I have found that this is often the case with such non-profit foundations especially in my experience regarding artists film [I have hit a similar dead end in the past regarding the films of Ana Mendieta]. Being an industry outsider I find this all very confusing and frustrating and I was wondering if anyone would be able to put the matter in some perspective for me or offer any advice on how I might profitably approach these foundations about such research purposes. Thanks, J

I'm interested in the initial shot in the film linked below where the lens flares from the sun shift and move about. I wonder if anyone would have any ideas about how it is done, it is hard to tell exactly what movement is being done but it appears to me that the camera is zooming into the sun but perhaps not, would there be a technique that might reliably reproduce this effect? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, James

Link above shows a thread that discusses the use of a 35mm adaptor with Super8. As far as I understand the use of a 35mm adaptor (having never been in contact with one) is that it uses a lens from a 35mm system which is focused onto ground glass and this is attached to the front of the super8 lens which focuses on the ground glass. The effect being that the apparent film plane, in terms of depth of field, is of the 35mm system, as thought the super8 camera is set up as a telecine of the result from the 35mm lens. My question regards whether the same principle could be feasibly improvised from a large format system, where the super 8 camera is focused on the ground glass, hence imparting a more extreme effect of depth of field. Any thoughts or predictions of how this might look and work would be much appreciated, J

Sorry I don't think I was particularly clear in my previous post, when I said dot pattern I wasn't referring to the video, I meant to refer to the dot patterns of digital printing. As I understand it is called process printing, using cyan magenta yellow and black and blending them optically in these patterns to produce colours (as opposed to spot colour printing which doesn't blend but rather prints solid colours from a wide palette (I think this is for graphic images that use solid colours)) The image below is the dot pattern of process printing. I mean to say that this may or may not be evident in the final result depending on the resolution of the print or the size of the printed frame to be scanned and that it may or my not be an interesting effect if it were evident (I expect they might blur together in an interesting way at 24fps), naturally all of this is a matter of experiment but I thought I might show my working in case it is of inspiration to someone. As you mention the texture of the paper is also of interest, I suspect the paper texture to be more pleasing than the printing mechanism being evident (the least pleasing of course is pixels so the scan resolution will have to be high enough to be invisible...) I really am digressing now but in a way the video above is a good example for talking about the different resolutions of the different mediums involved because the digital negative that was most likely used to contact print the cyanotypes probably did have dot pattern but it is of high enough resolution that it is invisible, yet the prints are made to a scale that on this paper the grain of the paper is visible, to nice effect. Sorry for the long post, J

Thanks for your replies, these are very useful suggestions regarding registration, I will certainly do some tests and I will endeavour to share results, although I am notoriously slow to manifest my ideas. It was my idea as far as I know, I did see recently someone made a music video with cyanotype prints on paper, looking at it again it is essentially what I'm talking about, I think it's quite effective: If it's of interest I am thinking about dot patterns of prints: with some high resolution prints I have it seems the dot pattern wouldn't be evident at a surprisingly small scale; maybe the dot pattern would be interesting, especially at 24fps. As far as I understand all digital prints use dot patterns but I might be wrong, I have also considered having darkroom prints made but I suspect this might introduce some lens distortion because it is projected (which would be a problem because I was planning on having the frames printed on a big print so if there was distortion the frames at the edges might be different to in the middle), again I might be wrong. I think regarding the texture it might be preferable for the evidentness of the medium to be more about the ink and paper than the printer mechanism - we will see - J

Planning stages of Super8 short film: In short the idea is to extract each frame of a short sequence of video (1 min @ 24fps = 1440 frames) and then having these frames printed onto paper, scanning the prints (presumably with lots of laborious cropping) and then reconstituting the resulting images into video. My intention is that the frames will be printed relatively small (though a high quality print), maybe around 4cm wide and onto a somewhat textured paper (this size will necessitate very hd scanning on a flatbed), naturally this will be a low-fi effect which is my intention (size and paper type could be experimented with). The resulting video could also perhaps be layered over the original to control the strength of the effect. I foresee registration of the scanned frames being an issue resulting in a jittery video with frames moving about. I wondered if anyone had any thoughts on this idea and any problems/ solutions that come to mind Thanks, J

Thankyou both for your very considered replies, I think I will shoot a couple of stills on the Super8 as above to see what it's like to play with but I expect I will get a similar result to yours David Thanks again, J

[Question is for a Super8 film but should be broadly applicable] Coloured lens filters can be used to adjust colour cast, however, as with the use of colour filters with black and white photography, it is my understanding that colour filters also effect the relative exposure of different colours, eg. red filter raises the relative exposure of red in the image. Would it therefore be considered possible within reason to apply a subtle coloured filter to the lens and then in post production to correct for this colour cast, thereby adjusting the exposure of the relevant colour (for example can warming filter be used to darken a blue sky while the warming effect is negated in post-production?)? Would this be problematic/ to the detriment of the image in other ways? -James