Digital, digital, digital.

In recent months there has been a migration in the production industry, especially in TV, from 16mm and 35mm motion picture stocks to digital video formats from DVCPRO to 24P. Many believe that digital imaging’s improving quality and the economics of shooting threaten to make the photochemical process obsolete. And yet Pro8mm by Super8Sound, a company headquartered in Burbank, CA, has built its entire business on the lowest end of motion picture formats – Super 8 and a professional version of it called Pro8mm.

If you are between the ages of 20 and 35 and can remember seeing home movies of yourself, chances are you saw them on Super 8 film. The Super 8 camera, precursor of the personal camcorder, was introduced in 1965, three years after its proposal by Eastman Kodak. Super 8 is based on the 8mm format, which was created by dividing 16mm film in half. 8mm’s biggest drawback was that with its smaller frame size, perforations and frame lines took up much of the film surface. With Super 8, the perfs were smaller and more toward the edge of the film, resulting in a larger picture area. Opposite to the perfs was room for a soundtrack.

The Super 8 format was very popular for a while, not only for visual mementos of birthdays and family vacations, but as an important training tool for film students. But when video became so accessible and easy to use, Super 8 nearly went the way of the 8-track. Pro8mm president Phil Vigeant says that since Super 8 is no longer a convenient consumer format [Canadian users will recall having to send the Kodachrome stock as far away as Switzerland for processing], it is now sought after exclusively for its particular aesthetic merit.

Super8Sound went into business three decades ago, but as it no longer deals with audio and primarily promotes its custom-made Pro8mm format, it incorporated the product name into the company moniker. Pro8mm caters to amateur and veteran filmmakers alike with its souped-up Super 8 cameras that replicate 16mm techniques. The facility manufactures, sells and rents cameras, sells its own film stock, and provides post-production services.

Vigeant says that through the years the company philosophy has been ‘taking Super 8 seriously, not looking at it strictly as a home-movie medium, but as a medium professionals could use for various applications and real projects.’

He readily admits that film isn’t always the most pragmatic option, adding, ‘Anybody who just wants to make pictures cheaply at reasonable resolution is probably better off in video.’

But for every George Lucas who proclaims ‘Film is dead’ there is a Steven Spielberg saying, ‘I will shoot 35mm until I die.’ Like Spielberg, Vigeant does not see film stocks going anywhere, and he believes Super 8 to be the most practical entree into the photochemical world.

‘You’ve got so much digital today that less and less is known about film, and so you need tools that will bring film to new generations of [moviemakers],’ he says. ‘Even if you’ve shot a digital feature, it would be hard to sell people on the fact you now possess the skills to produce a movie on film. If the market is still there for films, it’s a big jump, because you don’t know anything about film technology. You don’t know the difference between color negative film and an 85 filter.’

Pro8mm seeks not only to provide aspiring filmmakers with optimal quality for their budgets but also to offer high-end cinematographers a product in line with what they’re accustomed. Pro8mm’s cameras, like their 35mm counterparts, work with interchangeable lenses and true f-stops. And instead of promoting traditional Super 8 reversal stocks, the company takes Kodak 35mm color negative stock, adapts it to Super 8 dimensions, and sells it as Pro8mm.

‘That way you can use the exact same emulsions the ‘big boys’ would use in your little Super 8 camera,’ Vigeant explains.

In the past, the Super 8 filmmaker’s options basically consisted of Kodak Ektachrome Type G or Kodachrome Type A, which offered greater sharpness and superior color saturation. Vigeant sees Pro8mm as the format’s next level.

‘If your only application for Super 8 is to have the nostalgia of the ’70s, then Kodachrome is okay, but if you want to do modern kinds of things, you need modern film,’ he says. ‘[35mm] has the last 40 years of technology in its development. Kodak has spent billions of dollars making better 35mm stocks, whereas Kodachrome is 40 years old, and a dime hasn’t been put into improving it in that amount of time.’

The frame size of Super 8 is 1/15 that of 35mm, so the basic difference in image quality is in resolution, but as Vigeant explains, Super 8 transferred to video will yield higher res than video origination, and be somewhat difficult to distinguish from 35mm.

Borrowing from

still photography

Seven or eight years ago, Pro8mm took Fuji Velvia still photography stock, known for its fine grain, shadow detail and color saturation, and modified it for Super 8 motion picture use. According to Vigeant, the results were so popular that Kodak and Fuji subsequently released their own E-6 motion picture stocks for 35mm shooting. Taking from the still photography world this way allows filmmakers to benefit from the many attractive characteristics of these stocks previously unavailable in the motion picture world.

Pro8mm users do not have to deal with Super 8 viewers, splicers and projectors – which can be found only on eBay if at all – because the Pro8mm facility can simply dump the exposed footage onto video for post. It is equipped with Cintel and da Vinci telecines for color correction, just as in the 35mm world. Many of its customers are producers of music videos and commercials, where unusual looks – including grainier Super 8 – are not only accepted, but expected.

Although Vigeant admits this high-end posting does not exactly come cheap, overall the format remains economical.

‘Our camera is US$1,500 base price for the camera body, whereas the closest thing in 16mm is maybe the Aaton Minima, which is US$17,000,’ he points out. ‘That’s a huge differential, particularly for anybody who really wants to learn film. If you own the equipment, you can spend so much more time with it and do so much more.’

Aside from spots and videos, Pro8mm has been used on TV series such as Columbia TriStar’s Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

‘They need footage of things, such as recreating a scene for ‘the history of pain’,’ Vigeant explains. ‘ ‘Let’s get a crew of two and send them over to shoot all the different torture devices on a tabletop and give it some kind of flair by using Pro8mm.’ Against a guy narrating the thing on video, it looks interesting. It’s a different palette to play with.’

The weight of the cameras – as low as 1.5 pounds – means a crew of two can shoot these dramatic recreations in their own apartments. It is simply a fast and efficient way of getting the job done while providing some variation in style.

Show openings for Triage Entertainment’s Beyond Chance, which feature Melissa Etheridge discussing unexplainable events that have happened to ordinary people, incorporate jump cuts shot on Pro8mm for what Vigeant calls a ‘funky kind of look.’

The list of 35mm features that have used Pro8mm footage includes Flatliners, Varsity Blues, Natural Born Killers, For Love of the Game, and, appropriately, 8mm. The Snoop Dogg horror flick Bones, shot in Vancouver, and Rock Star, a comedy featuring Mark Wahlberg, are two fall releases with Pro8mm sequences.

According to Vigeant, the crew of summer blockbuster Pearl Harbor supplemented their 35mm action footage with hours’ worth of Pro8mm. In the end, however, the filmmakers opted to include only a more literal usage of the format, flipping to black-and-white Pro8mm to show the POV of a spectator who catches the Japanese attack on his home-movie camera.

On the other side of the spectrum would be Oliver Stone, whose inter-cutting of the format in Natural Born Killers often seems unmotivated aside from jarring the viewer out of 35mm complacency, reflecting the influence of music video.

So, while some features might still use Pro8mm only for that ‘home movie’ look, such as Armageddon, which employed it in a closing credits wedding sequence, Vigeant cites Toronto-based documentary prodco CineNova as a client who doesn’t think small when it comes to the smaller format.

‘They’ll recreate scenes of, say, a sinking ship tragedy on the Great Lakes using Pro8mm,’ he says. ‘They’ll use 200 to 300 extras in a recreate scene – big-budget kind of stuff.’ *

-www.pro8mm.com