Posted originally on S8 Forum...

Last January I bought several rolls of Tri-X and Plus-X. I soon discovered that they were the ones with the bad washer that caused the infamous jitter. Having lost the receipt for the original order, I couldn't return them. Anyway, not wanting to throw them out but not knowing what to do with them, I let them sit in my freezer until last Autumn when I began using them for test shots where jitter didn't matter.

For the short silent film I'm currently working on, I've written a script and storyboarded most of the scenes. I had several conflicting ideas about how to set up and shoot a long phone conversation that takes place in a garage. So I popped two Tri-X carts out of the freezer last night, allowed them to thaw overnight, and tonight I blocked out the scene, shooting all of the angles I considered. It took me three hours of crawling over the rafters, clamping floodlights wherever I could and stringing extension cords, but I got my seven minutes and twenty seconds of film.

I shot with a Leicina Super, a Bell & Howell 1235 XL (the Leicina's batteries ran down), and 1,775 watts of light (a 750-watt quartz halogen Lowell Tota, used as a key, a 650-watt Atlas-Warner light, and 375 floodlight.) 95% of the shots were done with the Leicina (lens rated at 1.9) and I used the internal light meter to get the f-stops--which ranged from about 2.8 to just under 11. I shot at 18 fps.

I should have the film developed by the end of next week.

Tom