I took a semester of school in Barcelona in 1982. It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up, thanks to one professor who encouraged me, calling to remind me on the deadline day. I prepared for the trip by buying a used Beaulieu 4008zm super8 camera. My initial film ideas were architectural and 3 dimensional. I wanted to bring back 3-D images of the places I'd seen for friends who weren't able to take the trip. To film a 360 degree walk around a spot essentially captures the space in 3 dimensions. On return, I had the film transferred to video using state-of-the-art machines and began to put together an album of my first film pieces. There was a 360 degree view of the tower at Pisa and a film of me running through Harvard's football stadium. (That was another of my approaches: the running film.) I received a grant from the Somerville (Mass.) Arts Council to complete the video album. I called it Sonnet Lumiere, as in poem of light, and sound, a name I'd already given to an audio cassette album where some of the soundtracks came from. I began writing something about hybrid forms of film and video work which didn't amount to much. What I was doing, in retrospect, was trying to work with super8 film the way we worked with cassette audio, as a handheld personal recorder. Super8 is a cassette media, just snap the cartridge into the camera and shoot. The cameras come from the simplest point-and-shoot to very fancy ones, like the Beaulieu which has adjustable ASA. Although super8 projectors can be used to present beautiful film screenings, carefully shot and well-processed film should be copied to video before projection tears up the film emulsion. Super8 is an excellent alternative to video and should be considered an option for almost any moving picture production. I have to some extent dedicated my life to the medium of super8 filmmaking.
See lo-fi clips of the Sonnet Lumiere films and purchase a dvd copy here: http://filmersalmanac.net/spool.htm
