It’s strange to think, but a decade before you were born, home movies were three minutes, twenty seconds long. Video recorders were a long way from the technology you probably have inside your phone right now: you couldn’t edit or re-record them, and they had to be professionally processed and developed.
The rise of internet video has sparked a resurgence of interest in this dated Super 8 technology and resulted in a remarkable new short film competition. Amateur film-makers from all over the world, beginners and the experienced alike, have dug out old cameras and created short films for a competition called ‘Straight 8’.
The rules are simple. You shoot a film on a single three minute cartridge with no budget, send it in along with an original soundtrack, and Straight 8 develops and judges it. If its good enough, the film is premiered in a packed cinema at the Cannes film festival, and then uploaded onto the competition’s website for all to see. Last year there were over 240 entries.
This sounds deceptively easy, but the restrictions it places on participants produces some fascinating results. Without any of the editing capabilities available to other films, entries become exercises in pure creativity. Winning entries span a huge range of the weird and wonderful, from dance routines to mini documentaries, and from fantastically original use of shooting techniques to a single shot of a man in a pub sinking ten pints in three minutes.
What’s so refreshing is to see the sheer variety film can contain, when Hollywood and commercial television have almost made us forget its even possible to deviate from established genres and plots. Its almost an unwritten law of films, for example, that the first major adversity comes after twenty one minutes, whether the film is a rom-com, action movie, comedy, or anything else. Films are supposed to show us something new and unfamiliar, but our generation often reacts with just a yawn to the latest techni-colour explosion.
Watching a three minute Super 8, however, even the familiar becomes fascinating. In one entry the camera zooms in on a woman from over a lake. It is a technique we have seen a thousand times before, except Super 8 cameras do not have a zoom function. To create this single half second of film required the cameraman to take a boat over the river, taking a single frame shot every few metres.
Another entry, depicting a man walking normally through London whilst the surrounding traffic and pedestrians move backwards as if the film was being rewound, has sparked an enthusiastic debate about how the film is even possible.
The other great thing about these films is that you know they’re real. When you see a car being driven off a cliff five times over, you know that five different cars have actually had to be driven off that cliff in order to produce what you see in front of you. The bloke who downs ten pints actually has drunk them all in the time it takes you to watch it: its a single scene, and therefore it is impossible for him to have made separate shots and edited them together later. We can only imagine what he felt like half-an-hour later. The point is that the Super 8 format stops us from watching these films just as an entertaining way to pass three minutes that we then immediately forgot. We know what we have seen has happened, creating a far more interesting experience for the viewer.
Instead of idly browsing YouTube or watching another South Park episode, check out www.straight8.net and watch a couple of last year’s winners. Whatever you think, you’ll see something startlingly uncommon to most films today – originality. You may even be inspired to search out that old camera of your parents yourself.
