Super 8 Mm Film - Popularity

Popularity

Amateur usage of Super 8 has been largely replaced by video, but the format is often used by professionals in music videos, TV commercials, and special sequences for television and feature film projects, as well as by many visual artists. For a professional cinematographer, Super 8 is another tool to use alongside larger formats. Some seek to imitate the look of old home movies, or create a stylishly grainy look. Many independent filmmakers such as Derek Jarman, Dave Markey, Sean Pecknold, Jem Cohen, Damon Packard, Sam Raimi, Jesse Richards, Harmony Korine, Teod Richter, Nathan Schiff and Guy Maddin have made extensive use of 8 mm film. Oliver Stone, for example, has used it several times in his more recent films, such as The Doors, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U Turn, and JFK where his director of photography Robert Richardson employed it to evoke a period or to give a different look to scenes. The PBS series Globe Trekker uses approximately five minutes of Super 8 footage per episode. Says creator Ian Cross, "it gives our show a particular look." In the UK, broadcasters such as the BBC still occasionally make use of Super 8 in both drama and documentary contexts, usually for creative effect. A recent example of particular note was the 2005 BBC2 documentary series, Define Normal, which was shot largely on Super 8, with only interviews and special timelapse photography utilising more conventional digital formats. Most recently, John Mellencamp's 2011 documentary film, It's About You, was shot entirely in Super-8.

Thanks to over a dozen film stocks and certain features common in Super 8 cameras but unavailable in video camcorders–notably the ability to expose single frames and shoot at several non video standard frame rates, including time-exposure and slow motion–Super 8 provides an ideal inexpensive medium for traditional stop-motion and cel animation and other types of filming speed effects not common to video cameras.

Another visual effect uncommon in video cameras that certain high-end Super 8 cameras can do in-camera is the lap dissolve. Upon activation of the lap dissolve feature, the shot being filmed fades to black, the camera back-winds the film to the beginning of the fade and, at the beginning of the next shot, fades in.