Prepare yourselves…. this is going to be a long one! It could have had several titles, Agfa Movexoom 6, Back to Super 8, Madness at the kitchen sink- You get the idea.
It started several weeks ago when an old acquaintance gave me a roll of Kodachrome 40 in Super 8. It is 40 asa BUT balanced for tungsten light. For use outside, one has to shoot through a (Wratten CTO 85a) orange filter to correct. Luckily this is built in to most super 8 cameras, one simply sets the switch to “daylight” that’s what it does! This drops the effective speed to 25asa. Many of us know Kodachrome 25 in 35mm. It was in perfect condition, just as I used to buy…
I still have my super 8 camera, or rather my last – I had many, which you can read as least 10 different models over the years. With the discontinuation of Kodachrome it got mothballed, although truth be told, it had almost fallen into dis-use before Kodachrome was discontinued. Several years not moving in cupboard didn’t do it any favours. When I did come to take it out, it didn’t work. Feeling rather sad about that, I sat with it on the sofa, just playing with it’s controls for a while, when rather like you see in films “a tiny flicker of life”!! On single frame mode, it clicked. I did it again and again. It wouldn’t do anything else, but there was life! Eventually I got 9 FPS (Frames per second) going, then slowly 18 FPS (badly), eventually after several days of clicking and pressing, I got it going! Since then I’ve made a point of popping in batteries every now and again and running it dry, just to keep it going. I thought about buying a cartridge, but then the cost – give or take £50 for a roll these days, that I could stand, but then it’s about another £100 to have it developed and scanned – £150 for 2.5 minutes (at 24 FPS) is just too much! Then the roll of Kodachrome came my way!
I decided that I’d run it through the camera, just for the sake of it. Then I decided that I’d shoot it for real. Having done that – why not have a go at developing I thought. Now I know it’s K14 process, I know that’s full of nasty stuff that quite rightly isn’t available, but I do have vitamin C 🙂
In the dark bag I broke open the cassette. If you’ve ever had any doubts about the durability of a cassette, don’t. It wasn’t easy. I got the film out, 8mm wide and 50ft long. I unravelled it as best I could and got it into a 5 reel Paterson Tank, and stuffed the lid on. On emptying the bits out of the bag, I was interested to see inside a cassette, of all the 100’s I’ve used in my day, it was a first! The light grey plastic you can see holds the film that side of the cassette, it passes though the gate, makes a sharp turn and is taken up on the core you can see this side. Clever stuff!
So with film stuffed into the tank I made my way to the kitchen sink! I decided that I would do a vigorous 3 minute wash in a Sodium Sulphite solution, I’m sure I read that was a good idea somewhere! I used one level tablespoon in a litre of water. Pretty much continuous agitation, and on pouring out it had obviously removed something. I’m guessing anti halide backing. Then I did 12 minutes in FX55, followed by the usual stop and fix.
To my surprise I had an image. Of course developing a colour K14 process film in black and white chemistry is never going to be good, however an image is better than none. The next fun job was to untangle a 50ft length of wet 8mm film. That’s another half an hour of my life I won’t get back! The drying was fun too – one side of the room to the other, plenty of “how long is that going to be there?” questions. Luckily it was a very warm day and it dried quickly. I had a root about in my archive and managed to find a length of white leader, another of my “that will come in useful one day” stock pile.
The splicer I haven’t used in years, but still remembered how to use it. Likewise the projector, in fact it was good to get it out again and run it for a while so that doesn’t cease up. All worked fine. I tried to film the small projected image with the phone – that was a waste of time. In the end I used my Canon Powershot, all set up in a quick haphazard way. I did get a moving picture. To be honest I couldn’t be bothered to invert the movie, (of course it was developed as a b/w negative and not the colour positive it’s supposed to be!) so I grabbed a couple of frames, inverted those and did a quick photoshop job to give an idea of what I got.
With a decent scan, some editing time, and tinkering in Adobe Premiere, I could make up a little short film. The quality however is just not worth the effort. The whole experiment though has made me wonder if I might just get back into the odd little short film here and there. It was nice to play with the toys again!
What did I gain from all this?
- I ran film though the old Super 8 Camera again
- I hand developed and got images out of a Kodachrome film that went out of date in 1994. 31 years out of date!! Albeit B/W negative instead of the colour positive it’s supposed to be.
- I ran the projector again, always good to shift the lubricants about and run power through the circuits. It all worked too.
Why do I like Super 8? Tacita Dean said it best…. I wrote about it here
S.H.O.U.T. 