cocopunk

In 2008 I shot a short film on 8mm for an introductory film class at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

The film lab didn’t have access to fancy film scanning machines that digitize the film frame by frame, so when you got your film developed, they’d hand you a MiniDV cassette with a recording of the film projected, somehow. Maybe through some kind of telecine setup that projected directly into a DV camera, or maybe literally a projection onto a wall — I’m not sure. But it didn’t look great.

Here’s a snapshot from the MiniDV:

The film was about a garden gnome who regrets running away from home; when he seeks out his person, she’s already moved on —to a lawn flamingo.* You can’t go home again, etc.

When I showed the film to the class — to rapturous indifference—some peers immediately had suggestions on how to make the exposure look better, as the darks looked too dark and yet the highlights were also washed out. (“Take a light reading in the shadows and in the sunlight and use the average.”)

I nodded along, fairly confident that I had exposed the film pretty well. It was just a bad transfer.

The class instructor’s feedback was that human actors might be more emotive than garden gnomes — which, fair enough.

So I recently took the film out of storage, thinking I might send it away to be properly scanned. Before spending money, though, I unspooled some of the film on a light table to see what it actually looked like, as photographed through a loupe:

Looks pretty good! Decent enough. And sharper than expected, for something that is literally 8 millimeters wide. I’m not going to actually get them scanned; I just needed to know that I hadn’t messed up the exposure.

Here’s an animation made from still frames of most of the shots.

*That’s actually the biggest regret; there isn’t a clear shot of the flamingo. And I used a wacky looking flamingo that didn’t read well on camera, when I should have gotten a very obvious classic, plastic flamingo. As compensation for the project, I offered the actress the choice of keeping either the gnome or the flamingo. She chose the flamingo, and went off to meet a friend of hers who she told me was a literal “wizard,” not metaphorically.

And one more thing I’ve just remembered— she mentioned her glasses broke so I gave her an old pair of mine, which seemed like a vaguely similar prescription, I guess? She was excited about it and left with glasses and a flamingo. That’s how Craigslist in San Francisco worked at the time.