I love shooting on small gauge film! In fact, my website used to be called 16mman.com, and this blog still bears part of the name. In film school I shot my class projects almost exclusively on 16mm, and I’ve also played around with Super8. I love the jittery movement of small gauge film, it’s rich grain structure and the timeless feel it can help generate. In this age of super sharp, super detailed digital video, it’s nice to shoot in a lower fidelity sometimes.
I was recently working on a short that I planned to shoot on Super8 black and white reversal film with my lovely Canon 310XL. Before I pulled the trigger on such a large investment though, I decided to buy a single cartridge of the film and shoot some test footage. Of course, I would never waste a whole three and a half minutes of Super8 film on a test alone, so I wrote a little one page script and shot that. Here’s the result, entitled NEW MAN.
Originally the monologue that the man, played by my good friend Scott McElroy, speaks into his micro cassette recorder was going to run before he meets his double in the woods, but when editing the film I found that the monologue ran way too long and actually just fit into the film’s running time. Instead of cutting it short, I decided to use the monologue as the film’s soundtrack, and I think it works. I like the discordance of the character’s fairly relaxed voice speaking over his crazed attack, and some of what he says actually perfectly matches up with his actions. We recorded the audio on a portable audio cassette recorder, not micro cassette sadly. The micro cassette recorder featured in the film was mine from gradeschool–I used to record days worth of fake news interviews with my friends on that thing!–But sadly it wasn’t working anymore so we had to use a normal sized recorder and tape.
NEW MAN is a film of little substance, but it helped me determine that, while I want to keep shooting on Super8, I just don’t have the cash to use it for longer projects. At least I got something kind of cool out of the test.