super 8 short

[Alex]

I could not get it to play on my iMac.

I have 256 ram and use a 56K modem....every time I tried to play you film, it would freeze, but it would go farther into the film each time...I got up to about 3-4 minutes...and gave up.

One side note, above the scree area you listed your name and the name of the movie...

Because your film had a lot of night scenes, I found the white background behind your name and title to be distracting...I'd recommend a darker color background.

Nice Music, wish I could have seen the whole thing.

Alex

[willard]

Greetings, I recently finished a short film shot completely on super 8, then edited on a media 100, check it out and let me know what you thought. http://www.423films.com/download.html
Thanks
Cecil Searcy

[mattias]

i'm downloading right now, so i'll give you feedback in an hour or so. (alex: you have to wait for the movie to download before you can play it ;-)

one suggestion: remove the pulldown fields instead of just deinterlacing before you export. the extra frames only make your video less smooth and the file larger in size. cleaner 5, aftereffects and virtualdub can all do this for you.

[mattias]

had some trouble downloading, so i'll give some technical feedback during this my third try. ;-)

there seems to something wrong with the gamma. the highlights and upper midtones look excellent and at the right level, but then it falls extremely sharp down to pitch black. i don't know if you lost all this detail in the video transfer, but i suggest you try and boost the lower midtones slightly. i realize you're going for a really low key look, but it's getting a bit hard to watch like this.

[mattias]

this might seem like a total diss, but i must say i didn't quite get it, and in that context it was way too long. maybe you could add some voice over or something to clarify? anyway, since this is a super-8 forum and not a director's, i must say i'm impressed. it's hard to judge the image qualities from a sorenson clip, but i like how you lit it and most of the camera work. most of all i like the fact that you actually pulled it off. i never had the courage to make a 12 minute piece on super 8. ;-) would you like to give us some details on film stock, transfer method, camera and lights used and so on?

[willard]

Well as far as background on the techical side...I used a Cannon 814 camera with Kodak K40 film stock. Some of the scenes were admittedly dark but the film was rated at 40 asa which required massive amounts of light. As far as lighting equipment we used mostly a professional grade Lowell package (totas & omnis). This was my first atempt with super 8, I am more familiar with 16mm. Basicly I tried to apply the same principals to this format.

Cecil

[mattias]

very cool. i'm planning on using the same stuff (canon 814e, k40 and lowell kit) for my next short. how did you transfer it to video?

[Alex]

Just curious if you actually shifted the internal daylight filter out of the film plane...

Sometimes people forget that Kodachrome 40 is actually tungsten balanced!

Alex

[willard]

To finish my earlier post, I had all the film developed at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons Kansas. There were very swift and offered to prep the film for telecine at no charge.
I then had it all transfered to Beta SP at CinePost in Atlanta (when doing your transfer, budget more than you think you will need...the charges go up really fast at $250 per hour)
Cecil

[jan_adolfsson]

Hi,
I liked your movie. There was no clear answer on what really happened and that is something I like, it give the viewer the oppertunity to really think about what it was he saw. Good work. I liked the camera work. I can agree on the earlier opinion that it was a bit long, but I think that feeling came from the bad format of the movie. If I had seen the movie on a movie screen or on television I dont think that feeling would have appeared. Did you use any filters when shooting? In what f-step is the movie shot in. I think it's really great, it's dark but it's still in focus.
keep up the good work...