I’ve fallen back in love with Super8 after doing a fantastic workshop at No.w.here lab a couple of Saturdays ago. The course was in Super8 camera techniques and development. I’ve become such a resolute DV user over the last 5 years or so – viewing the PD150 I use at work as the videographer’s AK47, and had also recently started to develop strong feelings towards the Sony A1E we recently acquired for vodcasting. But this workshop managed to take me back to the passions aroused during my first adventures in film. It’s rare these days to meet the true enthusiast turned expert but our tutor was that, translating a teenage passion into a profession. I’d bought my Canon 814 Auto Zoom straight after seeing Andrew Kotting’s film Gallivant at the Sydney Film Festival in 1997. I was beguiled by the scene where he posts the small yellow packets of film off to the lab to be developed – entrusting the bulk of his film to the postman. I took the Canon with me on a 6 week journey through India the next month and shot my first film (see 2 minute clip below – I realise that digitising and giving it a video edit is against the super 8 ethos). So eleven years later I was discovering what all those knobs and dials on the camera did – our group lusting over our cameras became like a Super8 festisher’s support group. We each shot 25 feet of film around Bethnal Green Road and Weaver’s Fields then took them back for the magical process of development as James talked us through the heating, applying, rinsing and fixing of the chemicals in the E6 process. Then the films were dried on a clothes airer before we set up the projector and watched the films – the results better than anything I’ve ever had from a lab. Since then I’ve been planning on building a darkroom at the back of my kitchen and have acquired a copy of the brilliantly geeky Small Format magazine. Super8arama!

Incidentally that is my sister in the picture with her Canon 514XL, who I gave a super8 camera to when she was at Chelsea College of Art and bought her a copy of Gallivant. She is now studying Film at Maidstone College with Andrew Kotting.