21st Century Flix

Nobody knows when the term home movies became dirty words, but one gets the impression that body odor and belching at dinner parties are now more acceptable than "Hey, wanna see my films?" Given the once-upon-a-time limitations of 8mm movie equipment, such a notion is not entirely unfounded. But a new day is upon us. While the stereotype of the somnolent living-room audience is not necessarily a thing of the past, neither is it an inevitability. The wonders of technology have made the top super-8 cameras the most flexible and capable motion-picture-recording instruments ever made. The things they can do may even exceed the present roamings of most people's imaginations, but little matter--live with them awhile and they're bound to spark something. They can make you eloquent in the visual language of cinema and put you in command of the most elaborate techniques; they let you film the unfilmable and capture sights such as you've never before seen. How do you do it? Just aim and shoot.

The cameras under discussion are not the cheapie specials found in a discount-house circular. You get what you pay for, and in this category of supersophisticated equipment, you pay $400 and up--way up. But the potential return on your investment can be correspondingly high and can take many forms. If it's glamor and glory you seek, cameras like these might put you in showbiz; super-8 is now used routinely on TV, while in a theater it can be splashed across a 20-foot screen. Or if your urge is to express the innermost poetic murmurings of your soul, the versatility of this hardware outstrips that of even the vastly more expensive 16mm and 35mm cameras. Or maybe you're just a hobbyist looking for something to keep you off the streets. If so, you'll (continued on page 149) 21st Century Flix (continued from page 92) find much of this gear so technically advanced that you could spend weeks trying everything for the first time. Whether to espouse a cause or simply to mark your passage in this mortal coil, you can pick up one of these instruments and, with perfection and pizzazz, shoot almost anything.

Of the 120-odd super-8 models on the market, there are a dozen that in some form will produce spectacular results on your movie screen (or on your TV set if you care to invest $1695 in the Kodak Supermatic film video player, a piece of science-fiction electronics that displays movies on as many TVs as you care to hook it to). This does not suggest that the remaining horde of cameras is without virtue. But the ones selected here have, in one form or another, a special claim on movie magic.

Several of these cameras can, for example, produce the effect known as the dissolve. It's a form of transition in which one shot gradually grows weaker until it vanishes, while a superimposed shot gradually takes over the screen. Traditionally, the dissolve has been used to mark the passage of time, a form of visual shorthand that deletes the insignificant while we move along to the next major event. But contemporary film makers have found it too attractive to relegate it to saying "later," so they've used it to characterize certain kinds of moods. It can be almost lyrical as the two shots meld, an exchange of dominance occurring while they are momentarily overlapped. The gentle way one shot leads to the next can reinforce a spirit of peacefulness or love, embellishing and strengthening the point established by the script and other elements of the movie. By caressing the eye and the nervous system behind it, the dissolve demonstrates how the medium can become the message.

Until recently, there were two ways to make a dissolve: with great difficulty and with great expense. Now there are six manufacturers producing cameras that create dissolves at the touch of a button and for free.

While the meaning of the dissolve has gone beyond its original one (its "invention" is often attributed to D. W. Griffith), the fade-in and the fade-out have retained their traditional, rather literary function. They mark the beginnings and ends of episodes within a movie--by turning the screen gradually black during a fade-out and by going from black to full visibility in a fade-in. Their function in filmic narrative is approximately the same as chapters in a novel. Fades were once cumbersome and costly to produce. Now, in a fair number of super-8s, they require the sliding of a lever at their most complex or the pushing of a button at their simplest.

Consider a device called the intervalometer, the mechanism that creates time lapse. This compresses the passage of time so that the otherwise imperceptible becomes highly visible. Take something as commonplace as the start of a new day. You've probably been aware of that red orb lounging near the horizon and you've known that the next time you turn around it'll be noon. But what about the events that precede and follow the sunrise? Have you seen the sky change from faint blue to vague pink, then to blood red in the portion that finally yields the ruddy ball of the sun; or the change of that sphere into blazing yellow while the field around it becomes enriched? It happens each day, regularly as clockwork. But until you've caught it on time-lapse film, you have probably missed some of it.

Such visual complexities are the outcome of a technically simple premise: When the projector shows things at a rate faster than the camera has filmed them, the result is an apparent acceleration of motion. The intervalometer exposes movie frames one at a time at a rate, let's say, of one per second. If the projector runs that film at 18 frames per second (the standard amateur speed), it will present in one second the events that took 18 to occur in reality. Reduce the intervalometer's operation to one frame per minute and in one second you'll see on the screen more than a quarter hour's activities.

Five manufacturers--Bauer, Elmo, Bolex, Minolta and Nizo--produce cameras whose built-in intervalometers can work at rates from six frames per second to one per minute; three are listed on the chart on opposite page. (The sunrise, by the way, generally looks best at a rate of between one frame every five and one frame every ten seconds.) If you're after something a little less cosmic than celestial movement, you can play the intervalometer for laughs. An especially pressured day can be characterized by turning a normal car ride into something that nearly doubles the speed of sound. Or if someone is willing to move with excruciating slowness for the intervalometer, your movie might show a person trapped in a world that goes much too fast for him. As people go whizzing past him, you can make a droll or cynical commentary on anything from science fiction to metaphysics to that old out-of-step-with-the-world kind of feeling.

A technique newer to movies than time lapse is the time exposure, in which the shutter remains open for a longer time for each frame than the usual 1/40th of a second or so. You've probably seen plenty of time exposures in still photographs, invariably in nighttime shots in which the headlights and taillights of automobiles appear as streaks of white and red etched across the picture. The technique has become practical for movies only in the past couple of years through cameras from Bauer and Nizo, which, by virtue of showing movement, make the technique all the more fascinating.

If, for example, you can get far enough away to view a whole city, you'll find that at night the sky above it is not really black. Instead, it glows with a yellowish halo, lights bounced up from the streets. An exposure of about 20 seconds per frame captures the bubble of light, with the outlines of skyscrapers standing in bold relief. Clouds become a seething, formless mass as they blur on each frame; the sky sparkles with mysterious streaks as aircraft circle; and entire sections of buildings become magically lighted or darkened as unseen custodians move from floor to floor.

The time exposure lends itself to special situations and special effects. But what about plain old everyday conditions in which light is weak? For locations where light is low, manufacturers have created XL cameras. They have faster-than-usual lenses (f/1.4 or better) and a specially designed shutter that somewhat extends exposure time (roughly 1/30th of a second per frame) and they use a high-speed color film that is about four times as light-sensitive as regular color film. Put all these characteristics together and you can shoot in normal room light or in the faint dawn and dusk illumination that leaves conventional cameras in the dark.

Besides eliminating the bother and discomfort (and occasional danger) of movie lights normally required indoors, XL cameras produce results that look natural and more attractive. Regular room lighting is soft, gently molding the contours that tend to appear harsh and flattened under movie lights. And when not put in the spotlight, people do their thing almost as if they weren't being watched.

Most of the XL cameras are less fully equipped than the other cameras under discussion. XLs were originally designed for people who consider their kids' birthday parties a major source of drama. However, the XL concept is too good to be restricted to such use. One manufacturer--Elmo--has already introduced an XL camera that is as sophisticated as anything on the market. Other manufacturers should soon follow suit.

While the Elmo is the first XL to incorporate extensive visual versatility, others have another capability that has caused a stir in the past few years: sound. These are known as single-system sound cameras, because the sound-recording apparatus records directly onto specially equipped film. The sound tracks are just fine for recording the human voice, easily comparable to what you're accustomed to hearing from a good TV set. Since all these machines have an automatic level control to govern sound-recording volume, making talkies is about as simple as shooting silents; the only extra consideration is where to position your microphone.

Single-system movies are aimed primarily at the mass market, making economy a virtue that teams with their simplicity. While there is a trend toward sophistication in the newer models, the fact is that no present single-system instrument is capable of any of the special effects of the other super-8s. Moreover, while single-system movies are admirably suited for projection in their original form, they do not lend themselves to such extensive postproduction work as film and sound editing or sound mixing and dubbing. Films that are to undergo these ambitious (a.k.a. professional) stages of completion are better made when the sound is recorded by the double-system approach. Here, a specially equipped tape recorder, such as the Optasound 116R unit, is run in synchronization with the camera. If your cinematic plans lean toward the lavish, it will please you to know that all of the more advanced super-8s can make sound movies by this method.

Regardless of their total production capability, the most advanced super-8 cameras still pay homage to the amateur for whom they were invented--someone whose biggest technical hurdle each day is turning a key in a lock. Through-the-lens view finders and electric eyes (with some form of manual exposure override in all the cameras featured here, to handle those conditions that bewilder robots) make technical imperfections something you almost have to work at to achieve. Film packaged in snap-in plastic cartridges is almost impossible to load incorrectly and is practically invulnerable to accidents.

The outcome of all this is that movies are better than ever. Choose your weapon from the chart below and come out shooting. Given a few bucks to spend, you can film whatever turns you on--from Keystone Cop humor to making your erotic dreams come true. One thing's for sure: Nobody's going to refer to your creations as (pardon the expression) home movies.

Playboy's Guide to Super-8 Movie Cameras