8mm film is unlike anything I’ve ever worked with before. It is flimsy yet durable, unlike paper. It is lightweight and compact compared to linoleum blocks. Its images are small and hard to make out without the aid of a lightbox or a projector, unlike a painting. What really distinguishes it though is the magic of not being to view what you’re recording until weeks or sometimes months later. Hidden details come to light through the projector and scenes play out much differently than remembered when they are presented at a rate of eighteen frames per second.
Shooting in film allows you to lose yourself in the adventure of making a movie, not unlike a child who is discovering something new and keeps finding one fascinating thing after another. I was fortunate enough to be able to experience this as part of an experimental film class last fall. I have a tendency to overthink about what I am making, and it often paralyzes me in a project. Working with film however, allowed me to be freer with my thought process. I set out to make whatever movie emerged to me in editing. All I knew when I began shooting is the film was going to be high contrast, primarily shot in downtown Hot Springs, and heavily surreal as well as experimental.
The films that we watched as part of the class were the main inspirations for my film. “Un Chien Andalou” by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali had a large impact its style, and influenced me to include long surreal shots as well as dark dramatic shots featuring nature. Guy Maddin’s “The Heart of the World” influenced me to shoot in high contrast and synchronize my footage with a dramatic film score.
My project came together for me in post production, it was only then that I could see all the pieces and how they fit together. This happened in a small degree when everything was uploaded to editing software. It came together in a much larger degree once I found music. I found the film score for “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” on an archival website and it tied in well with my inspirations and the style I was aiming for. I did a lot of experimentation with layering footage. I would take the frames that I liked the most and then copy them seven or eight times and then layer them on top of one another after lowering the opacity on each. Some I would mirror in different ways and with others I would edit the tint of the frame to be a muted pink or blue. In different areas of the film I would repeat the same process and then move the layers to overlap at certain points, timing the effects with the music. I hoped to mimic the dramatic style of silent films as well as abstract it slightly, with tension that built visually as well as auditorily and was followed with a resolve to the conflict that put viewers at ease.