A Short Film called Stop

I have finally put up a decent digital transfer of my short Super8 film, "Stop". If you're impatient, scroll down to the links.

But first, some backstory:

In...April? of 2004, I took a Super8 film workshop from the good folks at Radius Studio down on SE 22nd and Division. Short class, small group, very laid-back and open-ended -- if you've got a hundred and thirty bucks or so sitting around, you could spend it on worse things.

I made a five-ish minute short film called Stop, which, as it turned out, was the most ambitious thing in my particular group. I shot on both b&w and color stock and edited it all together using a crazy shooting script -- I think I planned it to 127 cuts, total. I ended up shooting almost all of it (cut a couple small shots at the last minute to conserve film stock) one crazy weekend, corralling friends together to be the improvised cast. It was a hell of a lot of fun, and very very sloppy.

Editing the film went like so: I sat down with my developed film (this was reversal film, not negative, which means you don't have a negative plus printed positive copies like in, say, b&w photography -- what you have is all you have, so don't mess it up, essentially) and I pulled out my edited shooting script and I spent several hours over three mornings cutting it up and pasting it together. The cutting involved lining the film up in a little film viewer, then moving it carefully to a splice-cutter and cutting between the frames. The splicing was the opposite, plus tape -- grab two bits of film that were to come in sequence (all of these little and not-so-little lengths of film masking-taped up to our bedroom window -- instant light table!) and lay them down on the splice machine, line 'em up, and apply some tape carefully.

After that, I showed it to friends and to attendees of my workshop's Showing Party. And then, eventually, I got it sent off to a transfer studio to get it converted to DVD.

What I got back was a passable transfer of a student project, but there were problems -- the picture color balance was bad, and there were jumps in the picture every time the film reached a physical edit point. Why?

1. Color balance: Super8 to digital transfers are generally nothing more than a camcorder pointed at the screen where the original film is being projected. Crappy old Super8 projectors (that's most of 'em) tend to just use cheap-ish bulbs, which are often pretty yellow in overall color, like indoor tungsten lamp lighting. This came through -- my black-and-white scenes were sepia, my color scenes were too yellow. I fixed this in Premiere with some color-balance filters and pumped up the contrast a little as well. Much better.

2. Jumpy edit points: the tape that I used to splice the physical bits of film back together didn't cause much trouble with the projector I was using for testing. They did, however, cause some trouble with the transfer company's projector, because the image in the transfer I got back leap to the right visible two frames before every cut, and leapt back into place two frames after the cut. Remember those 127 cuts in the shooting script? Watch the original transfer during short sequences of many cuts is maddening. Jump to the right, and back, and to the right, and back, right, back. Turns rapidly into an Oliver Stone joke. While George Lucas would probably have done something more impressive to remove the problem, I simple cut the offending frames. This reduced the overall film by probably 20-30 seconds, which sucks, but it sucks a lot less than the source material.

After all that, I was going to try to make a DVD of the film to distribute to friends for Christmas, but that turned out to be a pain in the ass to DIY, and I didn't want to go pay some jackoffs a big markup to do it for me, and so it has waited.

Until now. Behold! DivX format, two versions:

Fullsize -- in all it's (slightly-wide, telecined, interlace-artifacted) updated glory. 32 megs.
Half-size -- smaller, quicker download. 7.5 megs.