TECH COLUMN
Kodak Goes Back To the Future of
Super 8 Film
W
hat was it Marshall McLuhan said about the Four Laws of Media and obsolescence? Here’s your assignment: Google them and place them into the frame while considering Eastman Kodak’s new Super 8 camera and infrastructure announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. Yep, Super 8 film. Old school. Film in plastic cassettes. Buy, shoot, ship them back to Kodak and you get a link to a digital copy and the processed film ready to edit on screen or on an analogue editing console. Cut, print, project. Kodak calls it the Super 8 Revival Initiative, sub-texting it as the “analogue renaissance,” and it is nostalgic. What was obsolete is now reborn again, though Super 8 has always been available along with 16 mm, 35 mm and 70 mm, as, all those Oscar nominees will attest. It just hasn’t been this accessible. Talk about irony. If there was ever a digital revolution case study, it’s Kodak Eastman where in 1975 engineer Steve Sasson presented his invention of a digital camera to his bosses and was told to stop wasting his time. “Kodak is a film company,” he was told, and we know the rest. Like so many
titans of the industry, it was brought to its knees by the digital age. George Eastman may have founded his empire on film in 1888, but the magic wasn’t in the celluloid, it was in the infrastructure. Eastman sold cheap cameras to the masses and raked it in when they bought the proprietary film and other consumables to develop their footage. Kodak later pioneered the concept of film in cassettes to make them
light, safe and easy to handle, introducing the Instamatic point-and-shoot and in 1965 the S8 camera. They all followed the formula: cheap, affordable cameras for families and mail-in processing. Of course, you’d need to buy all the accessories, the projector, the screen, maybe an editing console. Kodak targeted the booming middle classes looking for a hobby just as George Eastman did initially.
Dianne Ouell R
egina-based independent filmmaker Dianne Ouellette doesn’t need to get reacquainted with the magic of Super 8 movies, she’s still shooting. Ouelette landed an impressive third place out of 530 entries in the Super 8 Filmmaking Challenge at the Slamdance Film Festival at Park City, Utah,
in January where the final 15 films were screened. She picked up a Kodak PixPro SP360 Action Camera, three Pro8mm Super 8 film kits, and a KODAK t-shirt. Her film, a three-minute single take, one-spool S8 look at her dying mother entitled Red is Dead, isn’t a happy film, she said, but was something she wanted to
22 • Canadian Cinematographer - April 2016
make. “I’ve been shooting with Super 8, even 16 mm and even a Barbie VHS,” laughed Ouelette who works at the University of Regina in the Media, Arts Performance program in a support role. “I get my stuff from garage sales. You’re drooling over a Super 8 camera and someone just says, ‘Take it, take it.’ With Red is Dead, I shot straight
into the camera with a shot list, no retakes, nothing. Just straight. I even shot animals and it worked out!” She shot on colour reversal from old stock, since Kodak only sells negative these days, and sent the cartridge off as an entry, sight unseen. The soundtrack was pieced together later. Entries came from around the
