Movie Maker magazine

 I used to read Movie Maker magazine, a British amateur film magazine. They had bound volumes in the university library.

Lenny Lipton's book, Independent Filmmaking, cited Ivan Watson's column in Movie Maker which explained a method an amateur filmmaker came up with for recording live sound.

They talked about cine clubs, about Pudovkin's theories of screen acting. If your actors maintained neutral expressions, the audience would read into it whatever emotion they thought the character should be feeling.

They talked a lot about trying to recruit actors from amateur theater groups and how it rarely worked. The actors weren't interested, they didn't have time. I can see that----they're used to performing plays by real playwrights, then they're asked to perform your amateur script.

They were surprisingly open-minded about art film.

They had to admit that amateur film could be terribly dull. In fact, when video began taking over, they pointed out that a three minute Super 8 film could seem like an eternity. Now people had hours and hours of videotape. It was a shame not to use it. So they would film hours of footage of nothing.

And that was before high definition. They talked about how bad the picture quality was with video. Super 8 was bad enough.

They talked a lot about making sponsored films. They would try to get businesses or organizations to sponsor documentaries about one subject or another.

I didn't realize that recording live sound for film was so difficult. You had to have a camera that ran at a consistent speed. You had to muffle the sound of the camera. You had to synchronize the sound with the picture. If you used a single system, sound-on-film camera, then you had problems editing. The sound and picture weren't together on the film.

Most people trying to make talking pictures would dub. There were magnetic sound Super 8 projectors. You could have a magnetic stripe added to your film and then use the projector to record the sound as easily as you could on a tape recorder-----a really loud tape recorded that sounded like a movie projector. You still had the problem of muffling sound.

The best method seemed to be to simply have the actors say their lines into a tape recorder after they shot the scene. You could put it on the soundtrack and it wouldn't be exact, but there were people who found it worked pretty well.

I thought the way to go was to shoot on super 8 without sound, transfer it to video, then dub the sound onto the videotape.

Editing in general was a problem. And then you had to make prints and super 8 prints of super 8 original films didn't come out very well.

It's so much easier now. And it's finally gotten cheap.

Video vs film---it used to be you could buy a good Super 8 camera new for a hundred bucks. That was at a time when a camcorder would cost around a thousand dollars. So you could buy a nice, compact Super 8 camera which, in theory anyway, produced a far better picture, plus 90 rolls of film and processing---over 300 minutes of footage, more than you'd ever want to sit through, for the same price as a VHS camcorder.

That was a theory, but I'm not sure how well it worked in reality. I didn't have enough money for a camcorder or for film back then. All I did was read the magazine.