Friday, November 18, 2011

New Film Old Camera

Well, these little yellow boxes on my desk can only mean one thing...



Yep, that's right, I'm scratching my 8mm itch again. Some weekends recently I've been out and about in Enfield shooting some proper cine film. I bought 3 rolls of this Kodak Ektachrome 100T film, and have shot almost 2 of them already.

I've been getting some funny looks from the locals whilst shooting... we don't get many tourists in Enfield, and even if we did, not many of them would be filming with a camera like this...



Yep, it's my 'new' Nizo 156XL, and the monstrosity stuck on the front is the Panasonic LA7200 Anamorphic lens adaptor. WHAT? Yes, I'm making my little film in Super8 16x9 format... exciting stuff.

The first finished roll has already been processed at Andec FilmTechnik lab in Germany and returned. (A round-trip of three weeks!) I've now sent that film over to Uppsala Bildteknik in Sweden for a Flashscan HD transfer. (I'll possibly blog a bit more about the logistics of all of this at a  later date.)

Who knows how the film will come out... Will it be jittery, will it be sharp, and for that matter will it be any damn good at all ???

2 comments:

Jamie Noakes said...

This looks great, and having seen the results, I must say I really like the way it looks! How much did that Panasonic lens cost?
Any more films planned shooting with this set up?

chrisgavin said...

Hello Jamie,

Many thanks for finding this and commenting, glad you enjoyed the film.
This Panasonic lens adaptor was initially designed to make one of their 4x3 video cameras shoot 16x9. Then all video cameras became 16x9 anyway, so it's quite a rare, niche product. But nowadays many DSLR video shooters are buying these anamorphic lens adaptors too. So, they're crazy money now, luckily, mine was about $200 s/h back when few people wanted them. I,ve bought some Black & White negative film to shoot some tests with this camera/lens next... I want to try some DIY film processing.