Three Colour 8mm Film

Three-colour process still

In writing a blog about film-based photography, there is always an unacknowledged (or perhaps underacknowledged) implicit understanding that any results are, by the nature of being shared digitally, a hybrid form. For some reason, I find this to be most acute in the moving image: the presence of the sheer physicality involved in projecting moving film becomes utterly absent once transferred into a digital form. The difference between a flat photographic print from a negative, and a screen-based display of that negative (whether scanned direct, or from a darkroom print) is great of course, but there is much recognisably the same about the experience of viewing (which, equally, is not to dismiss the real differences too). With physical moving images, the very apparatus of display plays a part in the viewer's experience; in the cinema, this is hidden from view, but in many other instances, the presence of the projector, screen, the sheer amount of material - reels of film, needed to kept, controlled as reels - impinges, bodily, on the viewer. This physicality has become somewhat fetishised in the visual arts: when shown in art galleries, films projected on 16mm or 35mm usually depend on the projector (and all the mechanisms for looping the film too) being present in the viewer's space.

A different kind of fetish is present when displaying such films in a digital form (something I am not immune from): the signs of the film's materiality, frame edges, perforations, dust and scratches - indeed, the very instability of the image, revealing that the apparent movement is comprised from numerous still images - are there as a guarantor of that materiality. I had been thinking of a way to use this digital hybridity in a playful way, that, in creating a digital version of a physical artefact, there was something more to use this for other than its convenience.  Last year, my interest in the three-colour process had been reawakened after assisting a student in creating images using the method, making colour images from three separate black and white negatives, shot through red, green, and blue process filters. I shot some still images with the Mycro IIIA a year ago using the technique (not posted to this blog), but also shot a short length of 8mm ciné film using the three colour filters.

Canon Cine Zoom 512 - Middlesex Filter Beds; Rollei 16 with Eastman Double-X film

For this, I finished the end of the roll of Orwo UP15 film that I had used for a number of other, very short films (Heatwave, Swinging Light), spooling off the shorter lengths as needed for each of these (I had also used a fair amount of the film for still photographs with subminiature cameras, notably the Mamiya 16 Automatic). This had a 'develop before' date of March 1976; using the film previously, I found an exposure index of 10 provided good results. I shot the film with the Canon Cine Zoom 512. Using a tripod, and a full wind of the motor, I framed the shot, depressed and locked the shutter release, and then held the red, green, and blue three-colour separation filters in front of the lens, for about 8 seconds each as the film ran through the camera continuously. I think that I may have shot the film at 8 frames per second in order to provide a slower shutter speed for the light needed to expose the film through the filters; the digitised footage itself plays at 12 fps. To compensate for the reduction in the transmission of the light through the filters, I metered the scene, then opened the aperture two stops. This meant that the sections of the footage in between the filters is over-exposed, and the section with the blue filter is underexposed, as the process blue filter transmits less light than the red and green filters.

For a subject, I shot the film at the Middlesex Filter Beds (a unintentional reference), with the thought that the three-colour process would record the autumnal colours. This was not entirely successful as I was probably shooting it too early in Autumn, in mid-October - and with the blue-filtered section underexposed, the colour record would not be very accurate (it might have been possible to open the aperture one stop further at this point, but not especially practical, doing the whole operation with one one pair of hands, passing filters one to the other after holding each one up in front of the lens). I then developed the film as negative in Ilfotec LC29 diluted 1+19 for 6m30s at 20ºC. This was over a year ago; only recently did I have the film scanned.

As 2x8mm film is 16mm-wide and run through the camera twice, I shot the sequence twice. However, I didn't use a changing back when removing the film spools and turning them over to shoot the second side (the 2x8mm film format is designed to be daylight loading, but this does mean sacrificing either end of the film on the spool in loading and reloading, not a problem when using a whole roll, and taken into account by the manufacturers of both film and camera; a different matter with a 'short end' such as I was using here). As I result, although I didn't realise it at the time of shooting, the first run of the film through the camera entirely lost the frames with the third filter in being exposed to the light. The second run of the film through the camera was more successful, but the section with the third filter was on the very end of the film, which includes the identification code of the film stock, punched through the film itself. This section of the film would usually have no images on, as it would be exposed on loading and reloading; I unloaded the film from the camera in the changing bag before developing.

In the resulting black and white film (above), on casual viewing the section with the red and green filters do not look especially different, except perhaps in the sky; the blue section is clearly darker, but also much lower in contrast. I composited frames from the scanned film in Photoshop, placing each black and white image into the red, green, and blue channels in the RGB colour mode.

RGB composite from the black and white negative scan

I had the 2x8mm film scanned as 16mm, i.e., the whole width of the film between the perforations, rather than having the film spit into two 8mm widths; as a negative, the film itself would not be projected anyway, so there is no need for it to be split as would be the case with film developed with the reversal process to make a positive transparency. As can be seen from the image above, the first run of the film through the camera, upside down on the right is a composite of incorrectly-filtered sections (the same colour filters do not align on each side of the film, and the blue-filter section on this run is also missing).

In creating a full-colour composite, I could have simply edited the film to a few seconds, aligning the three sections shot through the three different filters. Instead, I wanted to show the process as a set of logical steps, and, as the length of the whole film is just twenty-seven seconds when played back at 12fps, this could be repeated through each step. With the film was scanned as 16mm, as well as the width of image, the height is also over twice that of a standard 8mm frame, meaning that it shows two whole frames on both sides of the film. Repeating the film three times across the frame, I decided to keep the height of the original scan as this avoid making the proportions of the whole frame too long and narrow.

To show the process that achieved the colour image, I wanted to stage a set of logical progressions such as it might be possible to intuit how the colour image is created from a strip of black and white film without it necessarily needing an explanation (this particular post notwithstanding of course). The first repetition shows the film, in black and white, repeated in sync across the width of the screen (I could possibly have begun the series of repetitions as a black and white negative, but this seemed unnecessary); the second repetition, still in sync, shows the film in red, green, and blue. The next repeat then staggers the starting times of the red, green, and blue segments so that the point at which the correct colour filter appears in each coloured section is now aligned temporally. Repeated again staggered in time, the three colours spatially align on the the screen at that point to create the colour image. Remaining overlaid, each staggered coloured section runs to its end. The steps are then repeated in reverse, ending up back at the black and white footage, and in theory this could then be looped in on itself. 

A screen shot of the timeline in Premiere shows the way that the sequence of progressions is arranged. Although created in a digital form, it would be possible to recreate the result using three prints of the film, three projectors and the RGB colour filters in front of the right lenses; some of the earliest colour moving images used a not dissimilar concept, but on a single strip of film, with alternating frames shot through different colour filters, which would then be projected back through those filters to create an optical mix. The film (below) is essentially just an experiment intended to demonstrate - but also disclose - the technique itself.

'Heatwave'

'Heatwave' installation in Undertow at Sluice HQ

Last Summer, I was shooting some digital video on the very outskirts of London. It was a location where I had once drawn the scenes in front of the camera in a sketchbook many years before. While recording the landscape, I noticed smoke rising from the near horizon.  It was close enough that I abandoned what I was doing, and, following the footpath I knew would take me towards the smoke, I emerged onto a large field of stubble beside the path to find the far edge of it and the field beyond on fire. Fire engines had arrived, and were arriving, the flames were being beaten out while leaping up elsewhere, creeping across the field to where I was standing. This encounter with the present made me think that the project I had been engaged on - looking back at the landscape through the drawings years ago - lacked the immediacy of the present: that present, last Summer, was the most sustained heatwave in the south of England for forty-two years, and had, at that point, continued for several weeks.

At the time, I had been looking at early cinema, and had come across accounts of observers, amongst the very earliest viewers of films, remarking at how the camera captured the movement of inanimate objects, and that this was a revelation. This led to the piece called Paper Cinema in which the idea of a film responding to these accounts was paired with the earliest observations of the formation of a projected image - that of the image of the sun during an eclipse projected through gaps in the leaves of a canopy of trees - and in my initial conception of this piece as a film, there would be a voiceover describing these two phenomena as they appeared on two screens. Having written the text for that voiceover, I realised that this was sufficiently conveyed without the necessity of the image to move: I made the piece as a two photographic prints, with the text as an integral part of the prints. The viewer could read these texts and their internal voice became the voiceover for the photographs they could imagine moving. In thinking back to that earlier piece, I visualised a static shot of uncut dried grass moving in a slight wind. This would be the content of a short film, a moving photograph, whose subject was the continuing heatwave.

I filmed this with the Canon Cine Zoom 512 on part of a roll of 8mm Orwo UP15 film with a ‘develop before’ date of March 1976 - the same year as the most prolonged heatwave before that of 2018, and which last Summer was inevitably compared. I had already used some of this film previously: despite its age, it only needed a small increase in exposure to counter the loss of sensitivity with the passage of time to record a visible image.

The process of filming had to take into account the technological constraints of using this film stock from 1976 to record the scene. I used a short length of film rather than all that was left on the reel, long enough to fill the universal developing tank's reel - and documented the process itself on the same film stock with the Mamiya-16 Automatic. One of the reasons for using this, beyond just being able to shoot the 16mm-wide 2x8mm film, was that the frame size with the Mamiya-16 Automatic is designed to take double-perforated film - as with the 2x8mm format. Other subminiature cameras use single- or unperforated film which would therefore show the perforations in the frame. For the 8mm ciné camera, I spooled around five feet onto a reel to use in the camera to shoot the scene, and a second, shorter length for the stills camera. As the 2x8mm film is passed through the 8mm camera twice, I framed two adjacent views for each pass of the film. In between, the film is removed from the camera and turned over to shoot on the other side; it is possible to do this in the dark so as to not expose the film to light, but the format was designed for this to be done out in the light, albeit subdued light; on a whole roll of film, the beginning and the end of the reel are treated as a leader and trailer and not intended to be used for filming, but with a much short length of film, I shot from the point of loading until the end, leading to the image being bleached out by the light at each end. The film could have been loaded, reloaded and unloaded in complete darkness, which would have meant taking a black bag with me while filming, but I wanted this bleaching-out to occur as it felt appropriate to the subject. I panned the camera between this two shots; with a small overlap, the two framings show adjacent views of the dry, uncut grass.
Documenting the process of the film’s making, I realised that this documentation perhaps revealed more than the film itself. When taking the still photographs, I had broken down the process into five components: the film stock; the lightmeter; the camera; the scene or location; and the film itself after development, hanging up to dry. Having documented the process on the same film, these images were printed in the darkroom. Each of these images required a caption. With the 2x8mm film from the Canon Cine Zoom camera developed as a negative rather than a reversal or transparency film for projection, I could also print images from this in the darkroom and made a sixth print of two frames from the two different shots of the film. This was scanned as a negative unsplit along the middle of the film, as would be the case if reversal development was used to produce a transparency for  projection. For the Undertow exhibition at Sluice HQ, the texts for each caption were shot on photographic film and were also printed in the darkroom to the same format, both images and texts being made from the same physical material and would, in format if not attention, have an equality when displayed. The text was first laser-printed to A3 size then photographed with a Canon A-1 with a 50mm lens and a close-up filter using 35mm Rollei ATO 2.1 Supergraphic film. I rated this at an exposure index of 6, and bracketed the shots to two stops over; this film I developed by inspection with RO9 One Shot at a dilution of 1+200.

Printing the frames from the 2x8mm film in the darkroom required a mask with a folding baffle to expose one frame first, then rotated 180º to expose the second frame before development; the scale of the 8mm frames - a tiny negative of 4.8x3.5mm - was entirely dependent on how high the enlarger head could be extended. I had first printed a section of the film without the mask to determine the size and format of the mask that I subsequently made (as with negatives of the still photographs, I used the subminiature film adaptor which had come with the Kiev-30M camera, designed to fit into a 35mm enlarger tray, and keep the negative flatter than would be the case using it unsupported within a 35mm tray).

Making the film was a gesture at the contemporary, but became about the process, about the near-obsolete technology used. This technology has a relationship to the physical world that the digital lacks, and the caption texts reflect this: light sensitive material, the measurement of light, clockwork motion, the grain of the film. In exhibiting the photographs at Sluice HQ without the film, the descriptions point to something viewer is not actually seeing - and this admits the inadequacy of the medium to convey the physiological aspect of the heatwave. A narrative account in some form might have been able to use metaphor, description, a montage of visible signs but would still be inadequate. Again, with reference to Paper Cinema, this would have to be created in the mind of the viewer.

A shorter version of this post was published on the Undertow Research blog earlier this year. The Undertow exhibition was held at Sluice HQ London March-April 2019.

'Swinging Light'

As with photography, on which it depends, the invention of cinema has many claimants and each have their advocates; and, like photography, cinema was equally an idea whose time had simply arrived, largely as a result of other inventions, other technologies, the most important being photographic emulsion applied to a flexible base - film. If the cinema is understood to be a communal, theatrical experience, with an audience watching a projected image from moving photographic film, the first demonstration of projected film to a paying public belongs to the Lathams - Major Woodville, and his two sons Otway and Grey. With the exception of the eponymous loop, the Lathams are forgotten cinema pioneers, despite their first public projection in New York, May 1895. Like the Skladanowsky brothers, showing their first films in Berlin that November, the Lathams are treated as something of a footnote in cinema history due to the inferiority of their technology - the Lumière brothers are more popularly given credit for ‘inventing’ the cinema when they projected films before a paying audience in Paris, in December 1895.

On last year’s Expired Film Day, I shot a short film on expired film; intending to do the same this year, the inspiration came from two distinct aspects of Lathams’ story. The Latham brothers were suitably impressed after seeing Edison’s kinetoscope that they went into business as the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company with their father, and an engineer, Enoch J. Rector. After successes filming their own loops and engaging Edison’s William Kennedy Dickson to increase the lengths of the film inside the kinetoscope - specifically to film rounds of boxing matches - the Lathams, with Dickson and Eugene Lauste, a former Edison employee, embarked on a new company, Lambda, with the aim of producing a projector for their films. The Latham's first tests were made in early 1895: “The necessary motion-picture camera was constructed and then tried out on the night of 26-27 February, with Otway Latham and Dickson filming a swinging light.” The use of this swinging light for their first tests is evocative - although not explicitly stated as a light bulb - but I would like to believe that, if it was, its use seems to be an unwitting reference to Thomas Alva Edison. Edison claimed to have invented the lightbulb, despite prior claims by Joseph Swan and others; the Lathams drew on Dickson's expertise while he was still working with Edison, before he left to pursue the motion picture business with the Mutoscope and Biograph Company: one imagines that Dickson, who worked for a number of years on Edison's kinetoscope, perhaps without feeling like he gained the credit he deserved, worked with the Lathams on projection against Edison's resistance to it, before leaving the Edison Company for greater autonomy. Edison was left to catch up with the projection business, buying out the Phantoscope, renaming it the Vitascope, which made its first showing in April 1896.

Orwo UP 15, develop before March 1976

For this year’s short film, I used part of a roll of Orwo UP15 (15 DIN/25 ASA) 2x8mm black and white reversal motion picture film, process before March 1976. Although described as umkehr panchromatisch (panchromatic reversal), I discovered that the film would yield a negative, unlike the Svema and Technopan films I had used previously. These films could be developed to a negative stage but not fixed: the reversal process demanded bleaching followed by a second development to give a positive image; the films had a colloidal silver anti-halation layer which became black in the fixing process. The Orwo film by contrast worked perfectly well as a negative stock (the information leaflet with the film simply states that the film is processed in “special laboratories”; a return envelope is included - and no recommendations are given for home processing). I made some tests with the Mamiya-16 Automatic, rating the film at exposure indexes (left to right) of 25/12/6/3/1.5.

Orwo UP15 test roll

Despite being over forty years old, I could have used the Orwo UP15 at its original box speed, although these negatives were a little on the thin side. For the film shot on Expired Film Day itself, I rated it at an exposure index of 12. As last year, I spooled out around five feet - the maximum length to fit one reel in a developing tank, and shot the film at 32fps - although precise information is hard to find, one of the most in-depth sources suggested that the Lathams’ camera used 30fps (however, the results when played back at 30fps looked too fast - it's possible that the camera wasn't running at the correct speed; the film plays back at half the speed). The film was shot with the Canon Cine Zoom 512 and developed in Ilfotec LC29, diluted 1+19, for 6m30s at 20ºC.

For the first of two passes of the double-8 film through the camera, I simply filmed a swinging light bulb; the second pass, I filmed another double-8 camera, open, showing a test roll moving through its internal mechanism: that the Lathams are remembered in cinema is through the invention of the Latham loop (although probably an innovation by Eugene Lauste rather than the Lathams themselves). The best description of the Latham loop comes from Ethan Gates’ The Latham Eidoloscope: A Cautionary Tale in Primacy:

[The loop is] a purposefully slack piece of filmstrip, thrown out both before and after the exposure window in the threading path. When the intermittent apparatus temporarily stops the film, the continuously running rollers take up the slack from the loop following the exposure window, while simultaneously restoring the loop immediately preceding the window; after the moment of illumination and registration on the emulsion, the intermittent is then able to advance the strip forward by a frame by taking up the slack from the preceding loop, while restoring the loop following the window.

The arrangement of the two reels inside the camera, and the direction that the film is fed through the intermittent mechanism creates two small loops, which provide the necessary slack. Wanting to use both sides of the film at the same time, and the right way up, meant that on the right hand side I filmed the camera upside down. As a result it is shown running backwards, but this seemed preferable to having the swinging light moving in reverse, whereby it would speed up its motion, rather than slow down. As the camera that I filmed running does not have a very strong motor, it wound down quite quickly, but, in reverse, it is static and then starts up as the film runs. Having to feed the film through the camera when loading also meant that each side’s images had a period of blank film before shooting, but could then be shot to the very end of the roll, so each duration is stepped, out of sync; this also has the effect of showing the light on its own, nearly still, at the end.

Perhaps, ultimately, notions of priority in broadly collaborative fields such as the cinema matter less than the collective endeavour. The Lathams and the Skladanowsky brothers both produced technologically inferior systems, but which were seen by a paying public in 1895, prior to the Lumières’ famous screening at the Grand Café in December; however, the Lumière brothers had also demonstrated their projector to a private audience in March 1895, a month before the Lathams’ press screening - and their cinématographe, a camera, printer and projector in one device, lent its name to the institution on which it depended. However, the newspaper report of the Lathams’ first public screening prophetically understood, even then, the capacious nature of film:

“Life size presentations they are and will be, and you won’t have to squint into a little hole to see them. You’ll sit comfortably and see fighters hammering each other, circuses, suicides, hangings, electrocutions, shipwrecks, scenes on the exchanges, street scenes, horse-races, football games, almost anything, in fact, in which there is action, just as if you were on the spot during the actual events…”

New York World, 28 May 1895

Sources/further reading: 
Ethan Gates, The Latham Eidoloscope: A Cautionary Tale in Primacy
The Lathams Build a Projector - Film, Pictures, Eidoloscope, and Machine
Woodville Latham on Victorian-Cinema.net
https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture - which only mentions the Lathams in relation to the Latham loop.

Canon Cine Zoom 512

Canon Cine Zoom 512

"[The Canon Cine Zoom 512]...was intended as Canon’s symbol of movie camera technology. The goal was to apply 16mm-movie-camera technology in an 8mm movie camera. The fast f/1.2 lens was the first to apply Gauss for the relay lens based on the high-magnification and high-resolution lens of the Reflex Zoom 8-3 (marketed in 1962). This camera, with a variable shutter opening and spring mechanism enabling long time shooting, was called a “masterpiece” of movie cameras and was used for a long time by movie lovers, who wanted to produce high-quality movies."

Canon Camera Museum

Beginning this blog six years ago, I did have an idea that it could also include posts concerned with the moving image on film. Growing up in the 1980s, I was aware of Super 8, but this was something that other families had; at the same time, cine film was being supplanted by home video. It wasn't until the 1990s when I was given an Elmo Super 8 camera as a student that I shot a couple of rolls, but the expense of doing so no doubt prevented me from shooting more.

Super 8 succeeded the 'standard', 'regular' or 'double' 8mm format. Kodak had originally introduced the 8mm format in 1932 by taking double-perforated 16mm film, doubling the perforations, and designing a camera which would expose a series of frames (one per perforation) on one side of the film; at the end of the roll, the film was flipped over, exposed in the camera again on the other side of the film, and then split into two 8mm wide lengths, now perforated on one side only, and then the two ends would be spliced together to make a continuous 8mm roll. The Super 8 format appears to have been inspired by Kodak's success with the Instamatic film cartridge: a fool-proof, easy to load (and unload) system. Kodak took 8mm film, reduced the size of the perforations to be able to increase the image area (which is where the 'super' prefix comes from) and encapsulated the film in a plastic cartridge. At the same time, Fuji applied similar principles to come up with the Single 8 cassette. Both formats, but especially Super 8 with Kodak's market dominance, made regular or double 8mm obsolete. Although some earlier cartridge systems had been tried, double 8 film cameras generally used a small roll (7.5m) of film on a metal or plastic spool; when loading the camera, as with many still cameras, the ends of the roll are exposed and are sacrificed as leaders, whereas in the Super 8/Single 8 cartridges only a very few frames are so exposed.

The Cine Zoom 512 was the last regular 8mm cine camera that Canon produced before Super 8 was introduced. Considering that Canon first entered the cine camera market just eight years earlier with the Cine-8T (and, according the the Canon Camera Museum, only the third cine camera made in Japan), it's remarkable how advanced the Cine Zoom 512 is. The model number '512' is derived from its zoom factor - x5 and its widest aperture - f1.2 - a construction Canon kept to name its future cine cameras.

Canon Cine Zoom 512 with power grip

The Cine Zoom 512's specifications demonstrate the professional aspirations that the camera was aimed at:

• Fast f1.2 (stopping down to f22) 8.5-42.5mm zoom lens
• Built in CDS meter with 10 to 320 ASA range and exposure adjustment settings
• Single lens reflex viewfinder
• Wide range of shooting speeds - 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64 fps and single frame
• Continuously variable shutter control with stops at 'open', 1/2, 1/4 and 'close'
• Spring motor capable of shooting 4m/13ft on a single wind
• Reverse mode to rewind film for filming cross-fades
• Frame counter with single frame marks, one complete revolution for 80 frames/1 ft 

The camera was also provided with a number of accessories as standard, notably the teleconverter lens attachment, increasing the zoom to 14mm-70mm; there was also the power grip, which powered the zoom action of the lens as well as having a shutter trigger. The original case that the Cine Zoom 512 came in had these accessories and more: evidently well kept, all the documentation was still there, including the warranty card which shows that the camera was purchased from one Jardine & Matheson in Hong Kong on the 6th January 1965. There was also an address label, with the first owner's addresses at an RAF base in Kent, crossed out, with a new address, and a telephone number at a Maidstone police station. There's also a price label: £22 (although no indication of when this was sold for this price). Further, the owner had included a review of the camera copied from Amateur Cine World, dated December 3, 1964, a month before the camera was bought, and a couple of pages from Amateur Photographer 10 June 1964: the two articles that seem to be the reason for keeping these pages are 'The Right Way to Zoom' by George Zygmund and 'Any Time is Show Time' by Anthony Wigens.

Canon Cine Zoom 512 with accessories and ephemera

Also in the case is the instruction manual and promotional leaflet, a list of authorised service facilities around the world, a close up filter, cable release and viewfinder cap to prevent light entering when used away from the eye.

Canon Cine Zoom 512 controls

Almost all the controls are on the user's right hand side of the camera, with the exception of the aperture dial and the lens' zoom handle. This suggests that, with the power grip attached, the camera is held in the right hand, which can operate the shutter trigger, while the left hand focuses, zooms and sets the aperture - although, reversing hands, the aperture dial can be fairly comfortably used by resting the right hand on top of the camera from where the middle finger can easily find the dial. The ergonomics of the camera are important given how heavy it is - 1.7kg (perhaps being able to easily change hands, whether right- or left-handed, is a tacit acknowledgment of this). This factor is mentioned in the Amateur Cine World 'User Report': "First, the weight. A curse after you've carried it around for eight hours, but a blessing in use because of the rock steady pictures. With the heel of the pistol grip on a firm surface it is even possible to get satisfactory hand held shots on the 42.5 end of the zoom range".

Canon Cine Zoom opened for loading, showing film path

The weight itself does give a sense of solidity to the camera's construction: almost all components are cast or machined metal, with very little plastic used at all. There were a couple of minor issues relating to the age of the camera: I did find that the motor will drive 8-10 feet on a single wind now, meaning that it takes three full winds to expose one side of a roll of film, not two, as described in the manual; and there was a rubber roller on the film path which stubbornly refused to turn, which I simply removed and this seemed to cause no problems in shooting.

Technopan 8 8mm film dated Feb 1970

For a first test with this camera, I bought (very cheaply) a roll of very old 8mm cine film. This was black and white reversal film manufactured by Shostka Chemical Plant USSR for Technical & Optical Equipment Ltd. The film was a standard 25ft length, 50 ASA, with a date on the box of 'Feb 1970'. I initially assumed that I could develop the Technopan film as a negative, thus cutting out the extra steps involved in reversal processing. I tested the film by loading a small length in the Minolta-16 QT; the first test roll came out almost completely black and featureless. I discovered that the problem was fixing rather than developing the film: designed for reversal processing, the film has a colloidal silver anti-halation layer. This layer would be bleached out with the negative image in reversal processing, the remaining unexposed emulsion being subsequently exposed and developed to form the positive image.  However, I could develop as a negative without fixing: for a second test, I didn't fix after development, and I was able to scan the unfixed film. This had a compressed range of tones; had I processed the film as reversal, I would probably had better results, however, this would have meant buying extra chemistry, and going through additional steps in the processing, which did not feel worthwhile with expired film, just to test an old cine camera.

Technopan 8 test shot

Once I had tested the Technopan film, and was happy enough with the results, I shot the rest of the roll with the Cine Zoom 512, intending to make a short film with the results.  As the camera's motor is clockwork, no battery power is needed to shoot film; the battery required for the camera's light meter is of the obsolete mercury variety, but as the battery merely activates the meter itself, the camera can be used without it (the power zoom grip takes two rather more common AA batteries, which I didn't use: I set the zoom between shots generally, rather than shooting while zooming in or out, apart from one section at the end). For exposure, I used the 'Sunny 16' rule when shooting: the manual has a table which describes the relationship of shutter speed to frame rate, while the variable shutter's positions at 2 and 4, give the equivalent of half or quarter exposure, which, when coupled with the aperture settings, provides a wide range of possible exposures.

After shooting the film, I developed it in lengths of around 1.5m using stand development (some of this was done with Ilfotec LC29 at 1+100, for one hour, and some in RO9 One Shot at the same dilution; the Ilfotec LC29 appeared to give slightly higher contrast, although it was not easy to judge from the negatives themselves). With the unfixed negatives, I scanned these by taping several lengths to an A4 sheet of paper and used a flatbed scanner.

Technopan 8 unfixed negative scan

From the raw scan, I first flipped the image - as this was the emulsion side, the scan was a mirror image; the next operation was to invert the image to a positive and use levels to attempt to restore a good tonal range to the images. To compile the scans into a moving image file, I copied and pasted a selection across all of the rows in the scan into a new document and converted the layers into frames; setting up an action to do this in a single step in Photoshop, took much of the work out of what would otherwise have been an onerous task. I then made separate images for each of the strips, then a new document cropped from the left-hand image; the right hand image had to be rotated through 180º and the frame order reversed (otherwise this would be playing backwards). All the subsequent files created in this way were then exported from Photoshop as Quicktime movies and edited together, back into a single film using Premiere.

Technopan 8 scan, inverted from negative

Most of the footage was shot at 8 fps, some at 12, partly because I originally thought that I might only scan some short sections to animate, and doing this at as low a frame rate as possible would mean less work (additionally, the low frame rate provided the possibility to compensate for the film's loss of sensitivity in exposure); as a result, the film, mostly edited in camera, in its entirety, as has become five minutes long, rather than the more usual three minutes (some film was sacrificed for the exposure tests of course). In Premiere, I attempted to restore the frame rate to as close as how most of the film was shot, but I hadn't actually made notes when filming of what frame rates were used, so I did this by visual 'feel'.

A better test of the Cine Zoom 512 would be to shoot a roll of new 8mm film: although Super 8 killed off double or regular 8mm as a format (in much the same way that Kodak's110 cassette made other 16mm still camera formats obsolete, despite not necessarily being a better design), the film, although very rare, is still available (at the time of writing) from Foma in R100 and Orwo UN54. When I was a student, more than twenty years ago, I came across a clockwork-driven 8mm camera in a charity shop, but the shopkeeper warned me that they didn't make film for it any more. Perhaps the main reason that the double 8 format is still available is that it uses 16mm film, albeit with an extra set perforations, meaning that continuing to manufacture the film is not as difficult as even more obscure formats, like centre-perforated 9.5mm. After Canon introduced the Cine Zoom 512, the appearance of Kodak's Super 8 format, with its bigger frame size and ease of loading, changed the home cinema market; in response, Canon took the lens that they had developed for the 512 and modified it to the Zoom 518 Super 8 camera. The Cine Zoom 512 was the technological pinnacle of Canon's 8mm camera range, and then quickly became its swansong, the last regular 8mm camera that Canon made.



Sources/further reading
Cine Zoom 512 on the Canon Camera Museum
Historical evolution of film formats on sparetimelabs.com