Make a Movie With Your Friends ASAP (Super 8 Adventure - #1)

_{(a behind the scenes look at my upcoming film)}

Welcome to the first in what I hope to be a very long series of posts about my journey into Super 8 filmmaking.

Ever since July's car crash, I realized the only thing holding me back from making movies for fun is my own damn self. Not money, not skill—just me telling myself I could never make a good movie. I almost went into filmmaking professionally, too! I took 4 years of a college level video production class during high school, worked at the local television station for 2 of those years, and very nearly completed an entire half-semester of college to pursue filmmaking even further. Then, life happened to me quite bit for 10 years. So much life. I figured my filmmaking days were over. Sure, I could play around with YouTube videos but real movies? Couldn't be me.

Except literally why not?

I can't just sit around and wait for a better, more fulfilling life to happen. I'm tired of not doing more with myself. And what I want to be doing is making movies with my friends. I want more weird independent movies in the world and I want to have fun. Seems like a no-brainer! I decided that when my old good friend Max (check out their videos!) came into town for a few days, that we'd make a movie together. Luckily, they are as moviepilled as I am and was immediately on board. We spent the couple months leading up to their visit planning what we were going to make. We just had to make something.

That, as it turns out, is the first and only step to becoming a filmmaker—you have to make a film. If you want to be a good filmmaker, you have to keep making films. But it starts with the first one.

We decided to make something short, around 4 to 6 minutes. We only had so much time and I'm still in recovery mode, of course. We also made a decision that prevented us from spending any money on props or sets or anything, except for... Super 8 color negative film.

To be a filmmaker, you don't need anything fancy. 28 Years Later is being filmed on an iPhone 15 right now, and that's a big budget thing. You can use whatever camera you have. However, if you're like me and you have a Minolta XL401 and some money saved up... well, it's up to you. Digital has it obvious benefits and so much can go wrong with a used camera and an ancient film format. I just couldn't help myself lol. cohost got me hooked on film photography (long live the #coho film club) and I felt like I needed to make this shoot extra special. For a few reasons, but also because it's the first time I'd seen Max IRL in about 8 years! We've been good friends for 13 or 14, so it's been a while. Film just makes it special.

I shot a test roll earlier in the month and despite a haziness in the lens I couldn't clean away, it worked perfectly. The haziness kinda made everything dreamlike so we decided it was good, actually. I bought two more rolls of the same film stock, Vision3 200T. With 100 feet of film shot at the Super 8 standard of 18fps, that gave us about 6 minutes and 40 seconds of footage to work with. For a film we want to be around 5 minutes, it didn't leave us with much wiggle room. We ideally needed to get everything in one take. Good thing we storyboarded and scripted everything!

Haha just kidding, that shit's for nerds. We planned out an extremely basic story structure, Invented a Guy to Make Fun Of, and thought about what scenes we could put 'em in that took place around my neighborhood. With my new good friend Diane helping us out and driving us around, that opened us up to a wider part of where I live that would be hard to walk to. That was about it! Your mileage may vary wildly with this method of not writing a proper screenplay. or at least a detailed shot list. I don't know that I'd recommend it for beginners or for like, a professional shoot. But I also would recommend it. It's fun to find beautiful shots in the moment that sometimes lead to new scene ideas.

Speaking of scenes, boy howdy did we shoot a number of them! Without giving too much away, it's a small study of a character who I've been describing as a "disaffected suburban Banksy-type". Someone who feels trapped in the antisocial hellscape that is western suburbia and desparate for human connections, but whose idea of reaching out to people is putting up inscrutable posters on utility poles. We printed out 7 or 8 posters with like, Jenny Holzer-wannabe truisms that didn't actually mean anything if you thought about them too hard. We shot Max putting the posters up, wandering around, getting up to various tasks on Friday the 27th. Hot as fuck day—good for lighting, bad for Nicky. We shot about 75% of what we wanted to get before I gave myself heat exhaustion. The next day was overcast and we didn't have Diane but we got the rest of the film shot and ready to be processed.

I pushed myself way too hard this weekend but that was mostly because I was having too much fun! I didn't want to stop filming on Friday. We had people slowing down their cars to watch us just set up the camera. One guy was thrilled to learn we were using a real film camera and had a bunch of questions about the production. They could tell we were having more fun than they were. Movie magic is real.

Not only is movie magic real, but it's all around us. Waiting to be pulled out of the air and into your camera, whatever camera you've got. Film whatever you can think of and don't worry about the result—you can fix a lot in post, but if you had a boring/miserable time making it, no amount of editing can change that. Don't worry though! I strongly believe more people would have fun making movies than they realize. Try it out sometime :-)

Nicky Flowers - 09/29/24 - More blog posts about "Poster" (that's the title!) to come, as soon as we get the film back from the lab...