Georgetown Super 8 Film Festival

Last Saturday night was the third annual Georgetown Super 8 Film Festival.  Hats off to Laura Wright and all of the organizers for the success.  The last two years, I have had friends make films for the festival (Sean McBride and the rest of the Garfield High School film class of 06-07 & JP Moore and Steve Timlin made one last year).  They all raved about it and it sounded like a lot of fun.  So, when Jessica and I moved to

Georgetown

I knew that I wanted to make a film.  Emmett Montgomery had been talking to me about making a really short puppet movie for an upcoming puppet film festival, so I thought about killing two birds with one stone.  For the Hump contest, I took a stab at shooting super 8 and transferring to digital on my own, and thought that this might be good time to try reversing that process (shooting digitally and transferring to film).  Jessica (my wife) said that I was cheating and violating the spirit of the festival by shooting digital and transferring, but I talked to Laura and she said that people did it every year and it didn’t matter.  I really wanted to do the exercise.

Emmett spent a few weeks making some puppets out of brown paper sacks and I met him at Rebar to shoot it.  The editing was pretty simple and I was able to crank it out in an hour or so.  Doing the transfer turned out to be a little more difficult though.  After I made a DVD and tried to shoot it from a TV, GS8 coordinator Laura Wright called me the next week to tell me that it looked really bad, but that I had time to re-shoot it if I wanted.  Fortunately, I had also put a little test footage shooting it from a computer monitor at the end and since that seemed to look a little better, I figured I’d give it a try that way.  I turned the monitor brightness way up and she called to tell me that looked better, but you could still see the control bar at the bottom.  I shot it big figuring I’d have to crop it a bit anyway, so I wasn’t too worried about it.   

My mom and step-dad came into town for the weekend and we took them to the screening, but we had to leave about half way through to make our reservations for her birthday dinner.  It was really cool to see so many people coming down to support the event either by making a film (mid-forties) or watching them (looked to be over 400).  I thought that the venue was neat (one of the old Ranier brewery buildings that managed to survive the recent demolition).  Quite a few of the films that I got to see were really entertaining.  I wasn’t crazy with how the film version looked on the DVD because you could tell see the video controls on the computer in the shot, but I was able to crop it down and it looks a little better here.  The transfer also slowed down when played back from film, so it threw the synching out a bit.  I had to really adjust the audio on this version afterwards to make it work. 

If you are interested in the differences between Super 8 and Mini-DV, this should give you some idea, although keep in mind that these are both pretty compressed versions for Youtube and the film version has gone from video to film and back to video again.