I was talking to someone about shooting in Super8mm and they made the comment that developing 8mm film is not very difficult. Has anyone here ever tried to develop their own film?
For some reason, the idea of shooting footage, developing the film myself, then editing/splicing it by hand, then throwing it straight on the projector is very appealing to me. Even though I have no experience with film
It depends on what stock you are developing and how much.E-6 chemistry should be easy enough to come by for Ektachrome 64 as well as black and white reversal chemistry.Then you have to have some type of reel and tank system to run the film through the soup.
I've seen some of the small tank systems for movie film and to me they just look like too much trouble.I've processed and printed stills and I used to work in a motion picture lab.The problem with motion picture film is that you have such a volume of film to run(compared to stills) that to process much more than a few rolls in a small tank system would be so time consuming,it wouldn't be worth it in my opinion.Plus,you have the problems associated with inconsistent temperature and agitation as well as quality control on the chemistry,I can see where consistently good results would be a challenge to say the least.Still in all fairness,there are some people that swear by it.Few,though they may be.
There are some who swear by the magical process of getting their film ready to view in less than an hour. It can be done in your kitchen sink or in a special processing tank depending on what results you want. You can get chemicals to process both color and black white reversal/negative.
I used to process short strips of black and white negative 16mm film in a cheap Yankee film tank made for 110 film. I could do 6 feet of film at a time and used the inexpensive ready to mix small chemical kits Kodak used to sell (they came in foil packs). I did this to do quick exposure and setup tests with my non-reflex Bolex on my animation stand.
Yes Herb,small test strip processing can save alot of headaches for things like animation with a non reflex camera.
Personally though,I would prefer to use the trial and error DIY efforts in video transfer and editing.
This was in the days before computers and scanners. I used this method to also shoot pencil tests of my hand-drawn animation. In has been done this way in the animation industry for decades. Those "sweatbox" sessions Walt Disney's animators talked about was their pencil animation being photographed on negative film and screened for Walt to approve.
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