Japhy Riddle
Smaller Format on 35mm Film Animation Test
Description:
Because I'm me, and I have extra film camera bodies just laying around, I like to experiment. Here's the fruit of an experiment I did today.
In the past, I've successfully modified camera's so only half of the frame gets exposed, and then the film can be run through the camera a second time with a four perforation offset and fill in the unexposed gaps, giving the user twice as many frames per roll, albeit half-size frames.
I unsuccessfully tried to divide each frame into three. But, in theory it's completely possible.
This time I went about achieving a smaller format in a different manner. Here's the idea:
Take a camera and remove the film advance spool, or rather decouple it from the winder. This makes the film advance lever do nothing except re-arm the shutter.
Load the film in the camera and spool it all the way on to the take up spool.
Shoot and rewind the film with the rewinder back into the canister a bit every frame. How much is a bit? Glad you asked. A sixth of a complete rotation in this case. I put markers on the winder to keep track.
The film gate is masked of course so that only a little bit of the film is exposed. One one end of the roll, you get six exposures per normal 8-perf frame. On the other end, it's closer to four. This is because turning the rewind lever is spooling film back on to roll with an increasing roll diameter inside the can.
Next, the film is scanned at high resolution. Each scan creates an image 5172 pixels by 3445 pixels containing four to six small frames. Each scan takes around five minutes on my scanner.
Each frame is cropped and saved separately, and then animated. The frames are very wide—over four times as wide as high (the camera is turned on its side so as not to make tall thin frames).
I decided to crop further and replicate a 2.35:1 ratio—one of the widescreen aspect ratio standards. I did it by eye, so it's probably off. It was awkwardly wide before.
Since the video is only a few seconds long, it's been looped a few times. And, I chose to run it at 18 frames per second (like traditional super 8mm) to make it last a little bit longer.
Conclusion:
I'm doubting I'll ever go to the trouble of using this system again, but it was a fun (and tedious) process and experiment... unless someone pays me to do it.
Enjoy.
Smaller Format on 35mm Film Animation Test
Description:
Because I'm me, and I have extra film camera bodies just laying around, I like to experiment. Here's the fruit of an experiment I did today.
In the past, I've successfully modified camera's so only half of the frame gets exposed, and then the film can be run through the camera a second time with a four perforation offset and fill in the unexposed gaps, giving the user twice as many frames per roll, albeit half-size frames.
I unsuccessfully tried to divide each frame into three. But, in theory it's completely possible.
This time I went about achieving a smaller format in a different manner. Here's the idea:
Take a camera and remove the film advance spool, or rather decouple it from the winder. This makes the film advance lever do nothing except re-arm the shutter.
Load the film in the camera and spool it all the way on to the take up spool.
Shoot and rewind the film with the rewinder back into the canister a bit every frame. How much is a bit? Glad you asked. A sixth of a complete rotation in this case. I put markers on the winder to keep track.
The film gate is masked of course so that only a little bit of the film is exposed. One one end of the roll, you get six exposures per normal 8-perf frame. On the other end, it's closer to four. This is because turning the rewind lever is spooling film back on to roll with an increasing roll diameter inside the can.
Next, the film is scanned at high resolution. Each scan creates an image 5172 pixels by 3445 pixels containing four to six small frames. Each scan takes around five minutes on my scanner.
Each frame is cropped and saved separately, and then animated. The frames are very wide—over four times as wide as high (the camera is turned on its side so as not to make tall thin frames).
I decided to crop further and replicate a 2.35:1 ratio—one of the widescreen aspect ratio standards. I did it by eye, so it's probably off. It was awkwardly wide before.
Since the video is only a few seconds long, it's been looped a few times. And, I chose to run it at 18 frames per second (like traditional super 8mm) to make it last a little bit longer.
Conclusion:
I'm doubting I'll ever go to the trouble of using this system again, but it was a fun (and tedious) process and experiment... unless someone pays me to do it.
Enjoy.