Category: Archive

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The Making of 31 Days

Super 8 centred in an HD frame

I placed the 31 seconds of 4:3 edited footage in the centre of an HD frame, preserving the image quality by having its pixel size at a 1:1 ratio. I felt the image seemed a little ‘lost’ in the HD frame and would likely be smaller than other work in the compilation.

Arrangement of panes across the HD canvas.

In search of a solution that would use more screen-space, I then composited another two frames across the 16:9 HD screen. As seen in Figure 21, the outer two SD frames extend beyond the edges of the HD frame, shown as a black rectangle.

One Second a Day compositing with one-second offset on each pane.

I chose this arrangement in preference to having three smaller complete panes. Offsetting the footage in each pane by one second from right to left displayed subsequent clips in the three panes. The three video tracks in Figure 22 above are the right, centre and left panes, reading from top to bottom. When playing, each one-second clip appears partially on the right-hand pane, then fully visible in the centre pane, then partially visible on the left-hand pane, alluding to past, present and future across the composition, reading left-to-right.

One Second a Day film still – three Super 8 frames across an HD screen

The footage used in One Second a Day is silent. To create a soundtrack, I recorded a Super 8 film projector being started and running, syncing this audio to the moving images making an auditory connection to the performance of film projection. The machine used to digitise the footage was almost silent, its operation not disturbing the hushed, reverential space of the telecine suite in Soho. The sound of the Chinon projector being operated in my work room brings the footage home – literally – as the progress of a 50ft reel through the machine is sonically coloured by that space. Brandon LaBelle describes his act of clapping in a room as “more than a single sound and its source, but rather a spatial event” that is “inflected not only by the materiality of space but also by the presence of others, by a body”(LaBelle, 2015, p.xii). Recording the audio in a domestic-sized room with me standing and holding the microphone, shapes the audio, and to me, it speaks of the times when I first saw each reel freshly returned from processing.

Super 8 cameras usually have automatic exposure, so filming can be freewheeling in execution: frame, focus and press the trigger. The cost of the film and processing encourages frugality, so individual shots are fairly brief. Despite the consequent brevity of most of the filming – meaning more frequent in-camera edits – 30 of the one-second selections contain a single shot. Close inspection of One Second a Day reveals that a single one-second clip has an on-screen edit within it that then repeats across the three panes, shown in Figure 24. 

An existing edit in a one second clip

The short film was compiled with the other students’ videos to form a collection with a running time of approximately eight minutes duration, entitled 3D3: 1 Second a Day Showreel. The compilation is displayed by 3D3 on its website.

My Super 8 films had undergone a complicated series of remediations on their passage to include in the group project. The film frames were mostly shot at 18 frames per second, digitised to standard definition video at 50 interlaced fields per second, colour-corrected by a telecine operator and recorded to Sony DigiBeta half-inch digital tape. This tape was played out and captured to hard disk, then de-interlaced and placed in a 25 progressive frames-per-second high-definition video editing project. The SD telecine and video edit used ProRes codec QuickTime files with 4:4:2 colour subsampling. When the edit was complete, the subsampling was downgraded to 4:2:0 and compressed using the H.246 codec for playback on an LCD television.

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(Re)Remediation

Kodachrome Super 8 frame

Sea Front serves as a case study for the remediation choices that were made for the Super 8 practice experiments that follow. The first digitisation was a home telecine using a standard definition miniDV digital video camera to film the projected image. As described earlier, I set the projector to 18 fps and slowed it slightly to reduce flicker in the captured video. The editing was carried out in its native 50i interlaced format. The finished film won an award at the London Short Film Festival, despite, or perhaps because of, the ‘unprofessional’ low resolution rendition of the Super 8 footage which pulses – an effect caused by the frequency of the rotating projector blades.

Digitised Super 8 frames

A screen grab from this home transfer is seen on the left in Figure 19. The professional telecine conducted by Deluxe in London, described is in the centre. Although this was standard definition (SD), it was more detailed and did not exhibit the previous iteration’s pulsing. I recreated the video edit of Sea Front using the Deluxe scan that was carried out at 25 fps. During editing I slowed the footage to preserve the ‘feel’ of the first award-winning edit. Technology has developed rapidly making high quality scanning much more affordable, but it would still be expensive and time-consuming to re-digitise all my archive at HD or higher resolution. I did take a selection of Super 8 material to Bristol in 2019 for an HD scan where each film frame is captured to a progressive video file. The Super 8 film passed in front of a lens on the scanner, rather than across the physical gate of a projector or telecine machine. This process is gentle on the physical film and allows the whole width of the film to be scanned as shown in Figure 18 or zoomed in to the picture area as in the right-hand image in Figure 19.

Womad (2016) was edited using the Deluxe SD telecine footage and was screened on Sony Cube monitors. These obsolete 4:3 ratio CRT televisions displayed the SD material at its best. The difficulties of screening SD interlaced video on an HD flatscreen, and the strategies to cope with the mismatch are discussed in Skimming the Archive on pages 93-98.

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Personal vs Institutional

Some personal archives may find their way into institutional archives, through donation by the family, and so may come to form part of our social memory – but how ‘safe’ is this material? Many institutional film archives, such as the British Film Institute archive have digitised parts of their collection to make the material more accessible to the public and for educational and research purposes – and have preserved the original celluloid material. However, other archives may have only digital copies of the film material they hold. Will the ‘thin images’ of incidental moments of day-to-day lived experience be weeded out from the public archive?

Laura U Marks’ comment seems relevant here: “The less important the film or tape (and by extension, its potential audience) was considered, the less likely that it will have been archived with care” (Marks, 2002, p. 169) – or, I suggest, be considered insignificant to the construction of our shared, socio-cultural history by a dutiful archivist who may remove the material.

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Zapruder’s Frames

An example of 8mm film being examined in minute detail is the filming by Abraham Zapruder of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Zapruder’s film, with its shot of the motorcade inscribed onto the tiny Standard 8 frames, is an unbroken stream of vérité. The Standard 8 camera film is 16mm wide so when it was processed, split and re-joined into the 50ft reel, was any vital evidence lost? US Secret Service Investigators found his clockwork camera ran at 18.3 fps. allowing them to create a timeline of events. They then compared the footage to Zapruder’s previous home movies to identify anomalies such as first frame flashes that would show when the camera had stopped and started. This forensic scrutiny of his 8mm footage also highlighted the camera’s propensity to create visual information outside of the film frame as defined by the camera’s gate that, given the immensity of the event recorded, received scrutiny perhaps never before applied to photographic artefacts outside the picture area of a film, in tandem with the photographic evidence held within the frame. The Warren Commission report on the shooting claimed, “Of all the witnesses to the tragedy, the only unimpeachable one is the camera of Abraham Zapruder” (Bruzzi, 2006, p.20). However, Sean Cubitt observes:

Perhaps the most famous of all news footage, the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, shown on North American television for the first time only in 1973, is exemplary. No longer news, it had already become talismanic. Slowed down, blown up, and most of all repeated, the Zapruder film stands head and shoulders above similar moments, like the footage of the Rodney King beating, not because the event was more spectacular or significant, but because its meanings remain so profoundly uncertain. The film is evidence, but despite its forensic standing, it is inconclusive. (Cubitt, 2004, p.210)

Zapruder’s camera could not record sound so there were no auditory gunshots, and the cameraman was facing the motorcade, rather than inadvertently filming the shooter/s to his rear.

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Home Movies

The anthropologist Richard Chalfen researched home moviemaking (along with photography and later home video making) in 1980s USA. The collections he researched had material created between 1940 and 1980 (Chalfen, 1987, p.2). Chalfen found that domestic filmmaking conformed to what he described as ‘home mode’ that is capturing life events for posterity to be watched in private, normally by the participants who appear on screen. Furthermore, Chalfen recounts the ways in which ‘how to’ manuals and magazines – part of the commercial ecosystem of home moviemaking – encouraged readers to buy more equipment to allow them to edit their films and improve the end results. However, he found:

In actuality, however, most home moviemakers were extremely reluctant to do any editing at all. They simply did not want to be bothered with cutting, “gluing” or taping pieces of film; it was hard enough to keep all of their reels of movies in order “never mind fooling around with individual shots.” Few attempts were made either to cut out poorly exposed (or even unexposed) footage or to rearrange shots within one roll of film. When some form of editing was observed, it generally meant cutting off some excess leader at either end of the 50 foot roll and splicing two or more rolls together. The motivation for this accumulative “cutting” was simply to produce a movie that would take a longer time to show on the projector. (Ibid., p.55)

Few of my Super 8 films seem to have content identifiable as Chalfen’s ‘home mode’, but it is intriguing that they conform to the ‘unedited’ and disorderly state outlined above, nor were they ever watched in the way Chalfen found to be ubiquitous – a family gathering in a darkened room with the father at the controls. Roger Odin (2014) moves beyond Chalfen’s ‘home mode’ to propose two modes of engagement with home movies. The first is the ‘private mode’ of viewing in which a family collectively reminisces during the projection of a home movie where “what is said (the film as textual production) is often less important than the very fact of its being said: the importance lies in the exchange between the actants who participate in the communication.” (Ibid., p.17) Odin’s second mode is ‘intimate mode’:

By intimate mode, I mean the mode by which I recollect my own life and reflect upon the family’s past. During the projection of a home movie, the intimate mode happens by means of an interior dialogue: there is no externalization of communication. It is pointless to insist upon the force of effects that motivates this internal projection and upon the role that it plays in the construction of the individual’s identity; a construction that comes into being because of a differentiation from other individuals. (Ibid.)

Having spent a great deal of time with my film collection during this research project, my engagement with the films feels much more like Odin’s ‘intimate mode’. It is through the research that my interior dialogue has become externalised, at the same time the rushes have changed status to become an archive.

Chalfen, R. (1987) Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Ohio, USA.
Odin, R. (2014) The Home Movie and Space of Communication. In Amateur Filmmaking: the Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, (Eds, Rascaroli, L., Monahan, B. & Young, G.) Bloomsbury Academic, New York, pp. 15-26.

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Deluxe telecine

The facilities house I selected for the work had a long history in UK filmmaking and broadcasting at an address on Wardour Street, previously having been Soho Images and other businesses, but it was called Deluxe when I visited in July 2011. It was a strange experience having my ‘private’ Super 8 films laced up on an expensive Ursa Diamond telecine machine by a professional more used to working for television, music videos and advertising. The films had only been seen by myself and close friends, either projected or on a small hand-cranked viewer, now they (and I) were being treated like royalty, no expense spared. The telecine operator reported he had been digitising the film collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for months prior to my booking. The realisation that my films were worthy of the same treatment as a nation’s collection perhaps affected my relationship to my Super 8 films. It is hard to recall with certainty what I felt about the film collection before this time, but the grant application to have it digitised suggests that I considered it justified the attention, even if the thinking had not been fully articulated.

In preparation for the telecine, I had joined most of the 50ft rolls using a tape splicer to make larger 400 and 800ft spools to speed up the transfer process because Deluxe was charging by the hour. This was not an entirely orderly process, as many of the rolls were unlabelled and uncatalogued. Only when the mailer envelopes had project identification could the films be collated so that the larger reels had films running in a logical order. This splicing had changed the nature of the collection. Now there were longer running films with strange and interesting subject juxtapositions and jumps in time, instead of the camera rolls that would previously been loaded into a projector one-at-a-time, then each one experienced as a discrete visual piece reflecting, in a sense, the way they had been shot. The cartridge is loaded into the camera, exposed over a certain length of time – maybe minutes, maybe weeks – and then removed, so the filming is, in a sense, compartmentalised. The running time for 50ft at 18 frames per second is around 3 minutes 20 seconds which affords a particular viewing experience compared with ‘normal’ cinema – the screening is necessarily stop-start with the lights coming up to allow the next roll to be loaded into the projector. The compiled reels had created portmanteau movies which had previously not existed, and these were transferred to standard definition DigiBeta tape and later captured to external hard disks. The transfer process was smooth once the spliced film spool was laced on to the telecine machine.

The telecine suite was soundproofed and dark, coolly air-conditioned in contrast to the sweaty heat of the Soho summer outside. The films appeared on the expensive video monitors as the technician adjusted the colour balance and exposure, smoothly rewinding if I requested any changes. This was an entirely new way for me to experience the footage, and my understanding of the material, and my relationship to it had changed. This professional, hands-off, somewhat rarefied experience of the footage underlined the shift from physical film to digital, ‘amateur’ to professional, private to public.

As the years passed, there were huge advances in video technology which had two contradictory ramifications. First, the professional use of film workflows rapidly diminished, causing Deluxe Soho, among others, to be reconfigured as dry-hire Avid edit suites, losing all its telecine facilities before being shut down entirely by its American owners.

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Archive Origins

A box of films, sat under a desk, gathering dust. Most are single rolls of Super 8, some still in their mailer envelopes – yellow for Kodak, white for Agfa. Where were they shot? Who is in there?

My box of Super 8 films.

My introduction to Super 8 filmmaking began when I borrowed a silent Sankyo camera in 1987, from Plymouth Film and Video Workshop (PFVW), a Government-funded community video project where I worked. The camera had been gifted to the workshop by the widow of a cine hobbyist. Its portability appealed to me – in contrast to the heavy U-matic and VHS portapaks with separate video cameras of the time. The resulting reel of film in 1987 was exposed in Plymouth and Chelsea and transferred to U-Matic at the video workshop by filming a Bolex back projector.

The project had portable video gear – the camera and portable recorders of the time were both bulky and expensive – which were not suitable for my purposes a trip to stay with friends in west London, travelling the 240 miles each way on a motorbike. I had never used a ciné camera, but the Sankyo seemed quite manageable: on/off switch, shutter release, zoom lever and a lens that could be focussed. A cartridge of Super 8 film was purchased in a local Jessops photographic store and slotted into the camera’s film chamber. Details of the camera’s journey along the A38, M5 and M4 from Plymouth to Chelsea are lost in the mists of time; maybe it was in fact along the A303 past Stonehenge, but the camera and motorcyclist both arrived intact. Decades later, the memory of those days spent in London with friends are similarly hazy, except for the moments committed to film.

This roll of film was sent off to Agfa in its mailer envelope and some weeks later was returned in the post, the boxy cartridge transformed to a small reel of film with a white leader. PFVW’s benefactor had also donated a Bolex projector, which resembled a small television set, a black box with a back-projection screen. The whirring projector swallowed the white film leader and momentarily spat it out into the take-up spool, then Finborough Road, Chelsea SW10, appeared on screen, filmed from a friend’s flat several floors above in what had once been servants’ attic quarters of the grand house. The initial viewing of the footage was a revelation – vibrant colour, the surprise of seeing what had been filmed for the first time and a little relief that everything had worked. American film essayist Jenni Olson describes how she preserves her memories “in the amber of celluloid” in her filmic memoir The Royal Road (2015). In the same way, the activities in Chelsea all those years ago are retained in the 8mm-wide strip of analogue film which can be viewed, touched and experienced. The film was present in Finborough Road at the time of filming and is still with me – a physical memento, like the miniature Eiffel Tower I brought back from Paris on my first motorcycle trip abroad with those same friends.

My interest in photochemical film had been sparked by black and white 35mm still photography and darkroom work, which was taught as part of an undergraduate science course to facilitate the documentation of practical experiments. I became more interested in photography than biology and began to teach myself the former’s craft discipline. I carried on using Super 8 as a strand separate from the rest of my filmmaking and television career, which spanned documentary camera assisting on 16mm film and broadcast video, underwater camerawork, sound recording, 360 filmmaking and video editing. As my skills increased, I began running evening classes in photography and darkroom skills at Plymouth Art Centre, joining the community video project mentioned above, then lecturing at art colleges and universities. Alongside these varied professional ‘gigs’ the rolls of Super 8 film accumulated.

In October 2008 I enrolled on Plymouth University’s MA in Contemporary Film Practice for a full-time year of study. One module – Aesthetics and Technology – required the creation of a short film. I made a home-telecine of some Super 8 material that I had filmed in 2006 and presented the unedited footage to my peers and tutors in a presentation that was a requirement at the project’s planning stage. This was the first time I had considered any of my archive in an academic context. The resulting film Sea Front was submitted for the module and went on to success in various film festivals.

The success of Sea Front encouraged me to reappraise my collection of Super 8 and in 2011, a successful research grant application to Plymouth Marjon University, where I worked as a senior lecturer, funded ‘Freeing the Archive’. The project included the transfer to video of my entire Super 8 collection at a commercial facility in Soho, London. The title came from the idea that digitisation would allow me to work much more easily with the film material. Narrow gauge film is prone to damage, difficult to work with and risky to view since projectors vary greatly in quality and even the best are now decades old. Although even today it is possible work in a physical way with film, to cut and splice Super 8, have prints made and even have a sound stripe added, many practitioners use their exposed and processed film as raw material for digital postproduction.

My digitised film collection was now easily accessible to view and edit on a computer, the ‘archive’ had been freed in a sense. In the following months and years, the material was used as the source for digitally edited short films and viewed with an ease which was in stark contrast to the rigmarole of projecting the physical material. The physical archive remained in place, unaffected by its digital doppelgänger.

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10 years and counting

On 22/5/12 my sister Sandra took her own life, three years later I started this PhD. I had no idea that focussing on my personal film archive would, at times, be so hard.

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Derek Jarman at 80

I spent most of today digitally editing Super 8 footage filmed at Dungeness in 2009, adding audio recorded in 2020 at Slapton Sands. This evening I noticed from IG posts that it would have been Derek Jarman’s 80th birthday.

The image above was snapped from the window of a crew bus as we passed Prospect Cottage heading home at the end of a corporate job filming the Dungeness power station in 1989. Jarman filmed The Garden that year and you can just see the actual garden to the left of the cottage.

The picture was taken on Polaroid instant B&W reversal 35mm.