This is an impressive project. I wonder about the longevity of the 3d-printed mechanism.
Anyway, some years ago I went to a Lumière brothers exhibition. At the end of the exhibition there was an original "Cinematograph" in function.
I was astonished by the simplicity of the machine: It was just a little wooden box with a film magazine, a lens and a hand crank.[1][2]
And it doubled as a projector, just by placing a lamp behind it[3] (an oil lamp, and film was highly flammable back then, most early motion pictures were lost due to fire).
And that was it, it required neither electricity, nor any special or complex operation. I couldn't stop thinking how this little device was the start of one of the most important and influential industries of the 20th century.
I guess most of the innovation was in the development of the film itself.
Photographic film is complicated. Having cheap and readily available amounts of it is amazing — it gives us one pre-made component so that we can focus all our energy on hacking a camera.
This project is very cool because not only does it leverage pre-made film, but also that often overlooked marvel the pre-made electric motor is in there too.
The electric motor was such a marvel when it was first available commercially that you would buy one separately and then gather together a smorgasbord of different machines which you could use with your motor. If you told these people at the time that motors would become ubiquitous to the extent that individual devices would have their own, permanently attached, dedicated motors they would have been astonished.
Finally, if you don’t have access to a 3D printer but want to build your own camera, the classic example is the 24mm frame matchbox pinhole — little more than two film cans with an exposure chamber in between.
Records 4x32 8mm frames within the surface area of a traditional 35mm film frame. This way you can shoot 67 seconds of 18fps footage into one ordinary film roll available off-the-shelf.
The camera also works as a film scanner. This is brilliant because almost always you want to edit in digital.
The camera’s mechanical jitter could be stabilized in post, so it doesn’t seem like an enormous problem to me.
This thing films 1200 frames per standard 35mm camera roll!
It shoots 4 pictures on the 35mm film width. Which gives it similar specs to 8mm cameras. Constraint is : you can only film 300 frames at a time (a few seconds). But it makes the camera even more fun and unique.
This is worth developing semi-commercially through Kickstarter or the like. There's a market for this sort of thing, as demonstrated by the similar but hand cranked LomoKino camera: https://microsites.lomography.com/lomokino/
I'm a big fan of projects like this as it makes it very cheap to experiment with weird/exotic film stocks. This design is so advanced that you could shoot a 10 minute short film for a couple hundred $.
This is amazing. The results definitely look like vintage super 8. Jitter is super bad, not saying that it's a problem though, just the look. I'm guessing this is partly due to 18fps and party due to the tolerances of the plastic 3d printed feeder.
Overall amazing. I'd really like to see it with something closer to 16mm. I'm not sure how cheap or expensive that it would be but I'd be curious, that might be more usable in a practical situation.
The cost comparison doesn't feel perfectly genuine, because it considers development _and scanning_ of 8mm has to be done in a laboratory while it can be done at home for 35mm.
Regarding scanning, the author spent an inordinate amount of time building this amazing device than can scan as well as shoot; but he obviously could have built instead a machine to scan 8mm film. Even without it, it's fairly easy to transform 8mm film into digital at home; there are many tools to do this.
Regarding film development, I'm not familiar with 8mm specific requirements, but if the author is able to develop color 35mm film, which is not that easy in my experience, he should be more than able to develop at least B&W 8mm film?
The home-developed Kodak Gold looks a lot worse than what you’d get from a lab though. It sure has it’s very unique style this way and might even be a deliberate choice, but that film is popular for it’s nice and warm color rendering, not for producing so many false color artifacts.
Weird, c41 is an extremely standardized process. Developing times, temperatures, results etc. are very consistent. I get the exact same results by developing it at home than when I get it done at a lab. B&W is a lot more subjective and most labs will charge you more to develop it because it has more variables and can't be as easily automated.
Scanning and color reversal is where you'll probably see a difference for color negatives, but development, if done properly, should be very similar.
How tight do you have to hold bath temperatures? I haven't developed C41 at home but have done B&W, and reading about home C41 I remember that it seemed trickier to get right.
A sous vide device makes it easy to hold a water bath at a precise enough temperature that I get C41 results at home that are indistinguishable from my local lab, at least to my eyes.
I use a sous-vide circulator to get the products ~1F above the recommended 102F for the shortest possible development time (3.5min) and never had any problems! The kit I use (cinestill) is a 2-bath process (Developer, and Blix) and not accounting for the time to get the products to 103F, developing a roll of C41 film takes less time than B&W and gives me more consistent results.
Ah that makes sense. I was doing B&W with basically a kettle and a glass thermometer, I had no electronic temperature control equipment. I think I would have found it extremely challenging to do C41 consistently without that.
I'm thinking that some of this may be failure to compensate for the yellowish-to-reddish filter layer that's built into most classic color negative films to account for being printed with incandescent/halogen lamps. If that's ignored, the final image is going to come out blueish to cyanish.
Yup, that's very possible; when I do manual color inversion I usually fill a layer with the film base color, and use the "subtract" blend mode to account for it, else I get much "cooler" colors not unlike what is shown in the demo movie.
That was my first thought too, Kodak Gold is not supposed to look this bad. Converting color negatives is actually quite hard. You can get good results with software such as Negative Lab Pro (Adobe Lightroom plugin), but getting anywhere close to the quality that you get with a lab scanner (usually 20 years old Fuji Frontiers or Noritsu scanners) takes some serious skills. Also, when digitizing film with an DSLR, the light source is very important and has a huge effect on the colors
> Regarding film development, I'm not familiar with 8mm specific requirements, but if the author is able to develop color 35mm film, which is not that easy in my experience, he should be more than able to develop at least B&W 8mm film?
8mm/Super 8 film cartridges are not entirely easy to open, and you pretty much have to destroy them to get the film out. It's also difficult to find film reels that fit them by width, plus 50 feet of film length. They were never intended to be developed at home, but always in a machine (and exclusively by Kodak).
I don't remember Super 8 being available in negative emulsions either, it was always chrome/slide/transparency since you'd project the original film.
I'm awestruck with the dedication to detail, craftsmanship and quality of the design. And the creativity. I'm so glad the author chose to share this publicly.
Mad props, what a skill level. I've been busy for a day or so designing a bracket to hold solar panel cables, a project of this complexity takes some serious dedication. Really curious where this will go, 3D printers are still in their infancy but projects like these show their true potential.
What I love most about this is that it's basically the reverse of how 35mm photography was invented by Oskar Barnack. He wanted a more compact/portable camera to take on travels, because he was asthmatic, and ended up building a camera that could be used with 35mm film. (Or at least that's how I remembered the story, don't know how much of it is accurate)
Me, too! I had such a great time at your hacker summer camp when I visited a few years ago - met amazing people in beautiful Soča valley. Those images brought back memories of the extra days I stayed in Ljubljana.
https://pif.camp
Anyway, some years ago I went to a Lumière brothers exhibition. At the end of the exhibition there was an original "Cinematograph" in function.
I was astonished by the simplicity of the machine: It was just a little wooden box with a film magazine, a lens and a hand crank.[1][2]
And it doubled as a projector, just by placing a lamp behind it[3] (an oil lamp, and film was highly flammable back then, most early motion pictures were lost due to fire).
And that was it, it required neither electricity, nor any special or complex operation. I couldn't stop thinking how this little device was the start of one of the most important and influential industries of the 20th century.
I guess most of the innovation was in the development of the film itself.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Institut...
[2]: https://img.theculturetrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/10...
[3]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Cinemato...