MovieStuff wrote:tim wrote:
Here's another true story: One of the members of this forum, Chas out of LA, has a wife that was using Super 8 for her thesis or something in college. She shot and edited her piece and, by all accounts, did a good job of it. However, when she set up her super 8 projector in the classroom and ran the film, it was not well received at all. In fact, the students and the teachers did not like it one bit. Now, after pondering the problem with Chas and his wife, I suggested (and they agreed) that the problem wasn't the use of Super 8 but, rather, how the film was displayed. Certainly nothing beats the quality of original projection. But the rattle of the projector and the click of the splices as they traveled through the mechanism created a very " amateur home movie" atmosphere that conflicted with her on screen efforts. It was just too much for the audience to get past. We are certain had she presented the very same film on video, it would have been accepted differently because, like the paperback version of my book, the expectations of the audience are different.
Anyway, just my two cents......
Roger
Wow -- I'm actually quoted. haven't written here in awhile because I'm in my last quarter at school but I couldn't help notice my name in lights...
Actually, to expand on this story and since it has some relevance to the debate at hand...here it is:
My wife made two Super-8 films for her final two Masters projects (one was her final thesis) in ART SCHOOL. Note that I state ART SCHOOL because there is a NIGHT AND DAY difference in attitudes between a regular FILMMAKING program in a university and the pretentious wankers that make up 90% of all ART schools (sorry, just a little bitterness...)...
Anyway, her first film was shot in Plus-X and was a film about memory and architecture and since the apartment buildings she shot were mostly built in the '60s and the film was projected in S8 the art crowd deemed it acceptable since we were using "old" technology to showcase a project that dealt with the past. For this she received ok-to-good feedback (though there was some suspicion from certain students since the concept of "film" was somewhat foreign to these dorks who liked to make pretentious 'video art' projects that are so awful they defy description)...
Her second film was shot on 7240 -- this is where the problems began. It was set in a contemporary setting showing interiors with people doing everyday tasks while voiceover could be heard. yes, the projector did detract from this but it was also the film stock, the tape recorder she had to use for the wild synch, etc. But it was mainly the contemporary subject matter that made the audience wonder why it wasn't shot in digital video in the first place...
But then this is all so f**king subjective...a UCLA student representative came by to give studio visits...she checked out everyone's work...and chose one person to have a piece (any art piece would do) put in UCLA's prestigious Wight biennial exhibit in 2003 -- guess whose work she showed??? She viewed my wife's second film on projector with a portable stereo playing the soundtrack and LOVED IT. She saw beyond the extraneous baggage and looked at the message of my wife's film and thought that this would be a good art piece to show at the exhibit.
Yes, my wife did have the film transferred to DVD but that was simply for reasons of exhibition (not having a projector that could loop a film for 8 hours a day six days a week, etc.)...
