The Wonder Years

Any of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I have recently gained am extremely healthy obsession with Super 8 Cinecams. I found my first one in a charity shop for a very reasonable £3. Bargain. I couldn't resist.

However, knowing that I really needed a slightly better model in order to do what I want with it. (The £3 model didn't record with sound), I scoured the wilds of ebay and found the lovely Chinon Direct Sound model that you saw at the top of this blog.

Getting packages in the post is... well it's one of life's greatest little graces. And when it arrived I literally ripped the very well wrapped package apart like a child at Christmas. (Child at Christmas shown below)


My intentions are to film bits and pieces of tour/road footage with it, as well as use it in some future music videos perhaps.
I just think that that old 70's saturated colour footage looked a lot more interesting than this super crispy high def stuff. It had more character and danger to it. Plus the fact that the amount of time you have per film cartridge is around 5 minutes. Meaning you cant just shoot loads and keep what you want, you have to be selective and take good shots.

I studied film production at art college, and relished using some of my knowledge when we shot the video for "Story..." but this is a much more attractive way to rekindle my interest for filmmaking processes. I always wanted one of these cameras back then, and now it's come full circle and I finally possess one. Anyway, hopefully we should have some sweet gritty looking footage of us on our upcoming tours to show you soon.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the look of Super 8 film, here's a short film I found on Youtube which has some really nice examples of the aesthetics of Super 8. It's called "The End of The Reel" and is ironically about how it's a dying medium. haha.



As a side note... Getting this camera, and the fact that it's a dying art highlights something strange to me. See, everyone seems to be heading towards more super clean digital imagery, more super clean digital sounding music etc etc. And while there is nothing wrong with this, I seem to be constantly drawn to travelling in the complete opposite direction. Odd that.