Mission Visual

For the last few years, there has been a trend for event filmmakers to use old super 8 film cameras to capture weddings and events. There are some good things about these old cameras, and some not so good.

Super 8 cameras were really the start of home filmmaking in the 1960′s, and provided an easy way for people to create their own motion pictures. The film comes in cartridges, much like the old point and shoot 110 or 135 cameras. Film has an amazing look to it, and the old film style evokes much emotion and nostalgia.

Fast forward to today, and we have 35mm equivalent digital DSLR’s that shoot high rez HD images using motion picture lenses, creating clean, beautiful, sharp images with no picture loss. Yet, brides still want that old fashioned, nostalgic super 8 look. It just oozes emotion and beauty.

I have used them before, and I have friends in the industry that use super 8 cameras, and I hear from them that there are two areas that these cameras are lacking in. The first is reliability. Using a camera that is 40-50 years old at a wedding can be a little dicey. It’s important to have backup cameras, in case there is a film jam or just a plain-old breakdown. Spare parts are hard to come by, and you don’t really have time to fix the camera in most wedding situations. The second negative is that many of these cameras do not record sound.

Most people don’t realize it, but the main thing that separates photographers and videographers is sound. Yes, we shoot motion, but without the sound, we give up our trump card. A moving shot of a father’s toast – without sound – is just not very moving. Without the ability to capture sound, the filmmaker gives up a ton of emotional content. Most super 8 shooters don’t record sound.

The other option for the super 8 shooter is to capture sound with a separate camera. Many filmmakers have one shooter with super 8, and another with an HD camera capturing the same scenes. But an extra shooter costs extra money.

So, personally, I don’t see the value. You complicate the shoot, you complicate the edit, and you make the service more expensive. And all for an inferior image. And here’s the worst part. Once you shoot it in super 8, you COMPLETELY LOSE THE CLEAN IMAGE. You can’t go back.

So, that’s why we do it in post.

We use the same software programs that are used in Hollywood, to make an HD image look like a super 8 one. Is it exactly the same? No. But most people can’t tell. What’s more, we can take an HD image and make it look nostalgic, and if the client doesn’t like it, we can just change it back. We can even create two different versions of the same shot, one clean and one filmic. No extra cameras, we still get sound, and only one person shooting the scene instead of two.

Here is a sample of our film look process. Everything was shot in HD, and then the first half was processed in film look, and the second half was left HD.