03.23.07
Video-to-Super 8 Conversion for Obsessive Compulsives
In the summer of 2006, Jesse England of Oregon not only concocted but actually executed an ingenious if slightly insane method for transferring video to Super 8 using Premiere, an inkjet printer, and a boxcutter.
I shit thee not.
As explained on the official web page for the England Printed Film Process, one first creates a Photoshop template using the correct dimensions for the film. In Premiere, the video is converted to the “filmstrip” format, and this is then copied-and-pasted into the Photoshop template and properly aligned. This is arranged so as to fit the most Super 8-sized strips into a letter-sized space, using as many pages as you require.
This is then printed to transparency using an ordinary inkjet printer (or a laser printer if’n you have one).
You then cut out every single sprocket hole using a boxcutter, then cut each Super 8-sized strip free and splice the ends together in sequence.
England also tried an optical sound experiment for 16mm gauge “film”. In that case, “a screenshot of an audio waveform was reduced in size and placed in the soundtrack area” of the 16mm version of the Photoshop tempate.
The results are very interesting, and can be viewed as streaming video clips on England’s web page. Personally, I find I prefer the more blotchy look of the inkjet output over the laser printed, though I’m sure it’s much more short-lived. It vaguely reminds me of footage I saw once (and only once, alas) that was created by some crazy Germans who buried film in the ground, unprotected, for long periods of time until it was rotting and barely holding together, and then optically printed it (often burning up just as it was being photographed). It was incredibly beautiful and I sure do wish I still had the handout from that show. But anyway…I digress…
It’s impossible to tell how successful the optical sound experiment is since there’s no “true” source (say an MP3 or something) to compare it against, but in the provided streaming clip it’s about as noisy as one might expect.
Hats off to Jesse England, who graduated with an undoubtedly well-earned BS in Multimedia Design from the University of Oregon. More streaming video by Jesse can be found at Vimeo.com.
And hats off, too, to the Portland-area film scene, which is obviously fostering some very interesting ideas.
(Thanks to Wild Freshness for the serendipitous pointer.)
