◡◶▿ ROTT09 | Soft mechanics
👾 Every camera has a goblin inside. It's up to the filmmaker to be that goblin. Plus: the Tesla Cybertruck of Super 8 cameras and David Lynch in a cave. | Rotting the Image Week 09
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
Hello, welcome. Today, we’ll talk about the hypnotic powers of your camera’s inner workings. But first, settle in and think back to last week’s filmmaking class on “pathetic media.”
We learned how:
The cinematographer Fred Kelemen likens film vs. digital to real flowers vs. fake ones - a real live flower relies and thrives on being nourished.
But we might equally admire digital video’s durability and refigurability.
Still, every meaningful medium has a weak spot that could be its downfall: film degrades, video warps, digital video corrupts.
This kernel of disintegration holds significant emotional potential for the filmmaker who learns to exploit it.
Today’s lesson is an impassioned plea to work hard on decomposing your digital images. We’ll examine how:
👃 Film smells so lovely that filmmakers may neglect to adjust the smell of their actors and locations.
📹 Shooting video is so easy that filmmakers may neglect to adjust the settings.
🍵 Naive filmmakers have an odour all of their own, which may flavour their images.
👨🔬 Realistical digital videomakers have a habit of letting tech boffins decide what “real” should look like.
Plus, there’s a glimpse at the first new Super 8 camera to be mass-produced1 in nearly 40 years. Some recommended reading. And David Lynch in a cave. On VHS!
Please forward this lesson to someone you know will appreciate it.
The nearsighted film-maker
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept appears elsewhere in this module.
To bring a movie to life, the filmmaker must give it the capacity to rot. Rot creates an odour. A visual odour that emits from every element of a movie. This is true whether shooting on film or video, or creating and grouping moving images some other way.
The modulation of the odour of a movie’s look is a strong power and grave responsibility.
When working with an analogue film camera, it is hard to avoid engaging with this responsibility. It is hard to avoid because the analogue filmmaker must pay close attention to the apparatus to get any image at all! While paying close attention to the camera mechanisms, the filmmaker naturally considers how the film stock and camera settings will contribute to the movie’s overall odour. Great.
So. The analogue filmmaker pays close attention to how her camera and film stock will affect her movie’s odour. But this close attention carries a risk. The risk is that the filmmaker, engrossed in her camera, might neglect to develop the odour of what she’s actually shooting. She neglects to develop the odour of the scene because:
She is too busy with the camera and film stock to attend to the visual matter in front of the camera, or
She over-relies on the visual quality of chemical film to deliver a satisfying odour. (Because film looks lovely!)
Well, nobody’s perfect.
But maybe next time, she’ll remember to look past the end of her camera’s nose.
The neutral image
When shooting a movie on digital video, the first challenge is to switch the device on. (With larger, industry-grade digital cameras, there is first the challenge of assembling the machine.) But starting challenges are soon conquered. And then, it is straightforward to achieve exposure and record an identifiable image. Okay!
With analogue film, the filmmaker cannot start shooting without considering the settings. But when shooting with digital video, the filmmaker can get an identifiable image right away. It is so simple to get an image that a new filmmaker might neglect to adjust the factory settings (the exposure and other variables). And she might neglect to adjust the physical scene (most notably, the lighting) that is to be shot.
The new filmmaker might get so giddy with the power of the digital camera’s “go” button that she neglects to prepare her movie’s software and hardware to (de)compose a meaningfully pungent image.2
The image she gets may look just like the real world. Impressive! But this is the real world stripped of its visual odour. Of the quality of life and death that emanates from every visual element.
Because the real world is stripped of its odour, the filmmaker should cultivate a replacement odour: the visual odour of the movie’s world, its narrative, buried truths, metaphysics, and mediaphysics. But she forgot!
Such is the power of the “go” button.
Thankfully, her digital movie’s rather undernourished odour may be tinged with a hint of the new filmmaker’s giddiness.
Her movie’s look is somewhat plain, bordering on lifelessness. But the film crew’s naivety becomes intrinsic to the images. Their naivety reflects off the amateurishly exposed surfaces. An attuned audience will process and value this quality. They will imagine the filmmaker and crew as part of the movie. Yes, the attuned audience may even smell the visual odour of the crew as a troupe of invisible actors.
Let’s hope her movie finds an attuned audience!
Sadly, other filmmakers may have other reasons for neglecting to adjust the settings on their digital cameras.
One reason is that changing the settings might feel “inauthentic.” They reason that to change the camera settings is to interfere with reality as their camera sucks it up.
And, bingo! When filmmakers leave their digital camera on its factory settings, the image they get may look just like the real world. These filmmakers are impressed by their hard-hitting fidelity to the real world as it presents itself.
But it is, of course, a lie. There is no neutral format. A video camera is packed with software that adjusts how the collected light should look on screen. The image will be both dull and deceptive.
If you don’t make the decisions for your camera, and your edit suite, you’re letting some laboratory boffin thousands of miles away make the decisions for you. And he could be anyone.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Regressing forwards with the new Kodak Super 8 camera, “Camera.”
As long as we’re talking about the different experiences of shooting film or digital video, a new camera from Kodak promises the worst of both experiences.
The new Kodak Super 8 camera is called the Kodak Super 8 Camera. 😐. (By contrast, my favourite Super 8 camera is named Canon Auto Zoom 814. Other fabulous camera names include the Bauer C Royal 10 E XLM, Agfa Movexoom 10 Sound MOS Electronic, and the Sankyo XL 320 Supertronic. Have you made a supertronic home movie lately?)
The “Camera” camera costs US$5,495, which we call £4,360.76 where I’m from. It’s ugly, and not in a good way. The Tesla Cybertruck of Super 8 cameras. I won’t put a picture of it on this page. I’ll put the 1978 Kodak Our Gang here instead.
The Kodak Super 8 Camera offers several changes to the traditional Super 8 machine. Most notably, it has a fold-out digital LCD viewfinder instead of a pokey little eye-hole. And its “extended gate” offers a larger image and the chance to shoot 16:9 rather than 4:3.
Kodak boasts that the “image in the LCD viewfinder is not affected by the exposure setting; it always displays an optimally exposed image, for use in all lighting conditions.” This doesn’t mean your image will be well exposed. Just the video preview. Where I come from, we call this a “disaster waiting to happen.”
(If the image is well-focussed on the LCD screen, the image on your film should also be in focus. But I wouldn’t trust it.3)
The camera also records sync sound to digital card. Most Super 8 cameras don’t record sound at all. Some record it if you use special film. This special film is no longer available. This is as it should be.
(The best experience I had shooting dialogue scenes with Super 8 was using a cassette dictaphone tucked down an actor’s jumper. Anyway, even if you record sound digitally, there’s really no need to record it directly to the camera rather than to a more convenient external device.)
The Kodak Super 8 Camera is not a good idea for Super 8 beginners. Quite aside from the fact that £4,360.76 is too much to spend on a Super 8 camera. Or any camera.
Why not?
Because you need to establish a physical relationship with Super 8. Get on the ground with it. Squint through the eyepiece. Feel your buttocks clench as you focus and expose.
Not just on a spiritual level but on a practical level. If you don’t get to know the mechanisms of Super 8 intimately to start, you will fail - miserably, not pleasingly - again and again. Take it from someone who fails miserably every day. You don’t need to be super-technical to make good stuff with Super 8, but you do need to build that physical sense of what’s inside.
That’s the joy. That’s the point. That’s also how you understand the nature of the images you’re making. The LCD viewfinder, the “crystal sync sound,” are additives and preservatives, modifying the taste for both chef and diner. The Kodak Cybertruck is an instant roast dinner in a microwaveable box.
Should more experienced Super 8 filmmakers consider it? Nope! Super 8 is a process, a ritual, as much as a format. Alter those rituals, and you may as well switch format altogether.
So, at that price, and with those ‘advantages,’ what is the likely market for the Kodak Cybertruck?
High-end wedding photographers (don’t do it, high-end wedding photographers!).
Elite Hollywood filmmakers creating nostalgic flashback scenes for all their Jeremy Renners and Anne Hathaways.
And hopelessly lost lower-mid range production companies looking to get “that 16 mm look” on a lower budget. Don’t do it, hopelessly lost lower-mid range production companies!
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Kodak’s announcement has spurred Logmar Camera Solutions to update us on their imminent Gentoo GS8 Super 8 camera.
The Gentoo is “designed specifically towards production companies, rental-houses and studios wanting 16mm like image quality with the cost and convenience of 8mm,” they say. Specifically trying to preempt paragraphs like those above. It’s all getting to be a bit like the AI arms race, only cuter and in much softer focus.
Unhooked images
As long as we’re talking about media archaeology and digital odour, I caught up with a couple of image-quality-oriented issues of the excellent
this week. One tackles the phenomenon of Mini-DV, callings its look that of “a ‘real’ or source image that has been obstructed, disarticulated, unhooked. Reality through the back-door.”It’s really good. Do give it a read if today’s lesson spoke to you. Or perhaps more particularly if it didn’t. Sorry about that.
“Tell them how it started, John”
Finally, here’s a little French TV-on-VHS glimpse into David Lynch’s work environment, circa 2002.
Next week we’ll learn about the rhythm and resolution of the odour of your movie’s look.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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The first mass-produced, not the first new Super 8 camera. Logmar Camera Solutions produced 50 of these l’il lunch boxes in 2014. I wonder where they are now!
As a reminder, the odour of the movie’s image is created not just through the photographic apparatus and recording medium, but through:
Lens.
Light.
Colour.
Texture of mise-en-scene (the collective rhythm and thread of all that you place before the camera).
Texture of props and production design (the individual feel of each of these objects, fabrics, and other manifestations), including
Skin. (Few details leak the prognosis of your film’s decomposition like your characters’ skin.)
Sound.
Breath (effect of light on the air).
Atmospheric conditions.
Post-destruction.
Certain other post-production effects and mishaps.
Exhibition circumstances.
There are advantages to having a digital viewfinder to aid focus, but I’m not willing to engage with them here for reasons of obstinacy.