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Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Musings on becoming a Super 8 hero

I have a weakness for all things analogue. Maybe this is some form of technophile masochism, as analogue equipment is usually hard to connect to anything modern and digital. And so I fumble around with my Roland TR-606 drum machine (no MIDI), record players (no line level outputs), reel-to-reel tape recorders (no rca plugs) and so on.

Maybe I’ll start toying with another analogue technology: As I was (unsuccessfully) shopping for a Game Boy link cable today, I again came across a really nice small shop at Hermannplatz selling used photographing equipment. They really have a large selection of Super 8 filming gear, i.e. cameras, projectors and editing stations. And they’re dirt cheap, I guess about 20 euros for a simple working camera or a projector.

As I have no idea about Super 8 and the costs involved at all, I asked how much films and development were. A color film is about 15 Euros, black-and-white 20 Euros with about another 15 Euros for development per film. A standard Super 8 film is 15,25 m which equals 3:20 minutes at standard 18 frames per second (and yes, that’s silent movie of course). The (German) Wikipedia article on Super 8 gives more cool facts like the great slow motion function some cameras provide (by recording live action at double or triple speed). I’d love to have a slow motion film of myself jumping or doing other stupid things.

Of course, with everything I plan, that’s not really worth it. Still it would be cool to have special things filmed on real film, with all the technical imperfections and nostalgia-induced style. Just how retroliciously cool would a Super 8 “video” podcast be? (You see I love creating media breaches.) I wonder if it’s possible to set up a dark room at home to develop those films in short time, have them digitized and online at the same day.

Don’t panic, I won’t go there. Still a nice idea. I’ll bookmark the extensive super8wiki for later. (And no, retroliciously is not a word. And I love “analogue” with “-gue”.)