The first years of my life are documented on film. Sometime in the 1970s, my parents purchased a Canon Auto Zoom 512XL Electronic Super 8 Camera. This was their primary resource for shooting motion pictures footage of my toddler years back in an era when “Home Movies” still lived up to their billing. My father would occasionally pull out his projector and show off these old filmstrips during the late eighties and early nineties. But by then he had embraced the arrival of videotape. His reels of film were packed away, and the Camera was stored quietly in its original carrying case. It lay there inside a bottom shelf in our garage for almost thirty years.

It was J.J. Abrams and the motion picture Super 8 (2011) that began a personal yearning to shoot for the first time on honest-to-goodness FILM. How would something furry appear when exposed to the soft grainy tones of Super 8 rather than the pristine razor-sharp clarity of a digital medium? Alas, from what I deduced the process was prohibitively expensive, film stock rare to come by, and it would be necessary to ship the film out of province for processing. Furthermore, upon screening  Yummers/King Gourd’s well-made Super 8 footage in the Autumn of 2012, it seemed like the moment to stake a claim had passed. The project was called off; though seeing Gourd’s films from “Furfright 1977 & Furry Connection North 1978” would keep the inclination simmering.

During the spring of 2015, I once again began looking into the practicality of reawakening the old Camera. Now approached from an improved financial position, after attending that year’s Procession of the Species in Bellingham, Washington, the decision was made to record the entire 2016 Procession on Super 8 film. Over the intervening year, I gathered information about having the Camera serviced, locating film to purchase, a lab to process said film, and a company which could scan the footage for editing and exhibition. In November, this scheme began operating under the codename “PROJECT 8-BALL”.

Then, in January 2016, Kodak stunned the filmmaking world. At that year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company unveiled a brand new 21st Century Super 8 Camera. With a retail launch scheduled for laterthe same year, it appeared that Super 8 was poised to make a grand comeback. I was not prepared to wait. I wanted to shoot on a vintage Camera instead of the boxy new prototype. I wanted to get ahead of the curve.

In March of 2016, the Camera paid a visit to CamTex Camera Repair Service in Vancouver. As was to be expected, the Camera had not been sitting in pristine condition for thirty years. Several parts required replacing and cleaning in order restore the device to working order. I then purchased three rolls of Kodak VISION3 50D Color Negative Film 7203 from the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (I would find time to expose two cartridges during the Procession). I read up on shooting in Super 8 and with that particular model of Camera. I started teasing people with the promise that—if everything went according to plan—I was going to conduct “An experiment in making history” during the Procession. I said nothing more.

May 7th was a gorgeous clear day. I rolled down to Bellingham with  Foxfan1992,  orwin and  sairyswolf in tow. Before the Procession got underway, the Camera was displayed to those members of  furlife who were in attendance. And then the filming started.

Fortunately, I was not shooting completely without precedent. All of my photographs prior to 2006 were shot on film, and I still use manual settings to adjust exposure and (in the case of video) focus on the fly. The 512XL operated in a similar fashion. Only exposure was automatically adjusted by the Camera itself (and even that was optional); the rest was up to the operator. The greatest handicap was being unable to see what I had just recorded. Since there was no playback, one did not get the instantaneous feedback now taken for granted. First the film cartridge had to be inserted (correctly) into the Camera. Then the focus was caught by zooming in and staring through the viewfinder at a circle with a line through its center. If the image in both halves of the circle was aligned, the shot was in focus. This proved to be the most time consuming and frustrating aspect of the process. The fursuiters were always in motion. One could not always tell them to hold still; especially if they were in the midst of interacting with somebody. Once focus has been (hopefully) achieved, the shutter was pulled halfway to allow the automatic exposure to meter adjustments. Then the shutter was pressed in full, and the camera made a loud satisfying whirring noise as the film passed through the gate. When you changed setups you had to repeat this process again. With each press, a gauge would count upwards through the fifty feet of film per cartridge. Then you would pop open the back of the Camera to insert a new cartridge, hoping that what you had recorded on the old cartridge would be suitable for later viewing. From an efficiency standpoint it was frustratingly cumbersome. But it felt good to have taken a step back into something that felt almost primitive yet more organic and cerebral; something which forced you to budget your work and concentrate on capturing only the best images. Despite having brandied about terms like “Filming” over the years, in my work if it is an electronic image then it is decidedly not filming and is always video. You can therefore imagine my personal elation when Sairys asked, “How’s the video coming along?” and I excitedly turned to him, shouting, “It’s not a video!”

Within 24 hours of the Procession being completed, the film was on its way back to Toronto and Niagara Custom Lab. The waiting began. For several weeks, I had no idea how the footage had turned out. Once the processed film was returned, it visited Lifetime Heritage Films here in the Lower Mainland. At this final stage of the process, the two reels of film were combined and then scanned into an MXF file. Only then was it finally possible to see what had been recorded on film.

Amazingly for a first timer, very little of the footage was unusable. Most of the images were well exposed and in focus. But I had made one enormous error; fortunately I had also covered my tail. At LHF, I asked for both RAW and Color Corrected video files to compare the quality of their services. It was immediately evident that the RAW file’s colors were unnaturally warm. My suspicion is that the Camera’s built-in CCA Filter had been improperly set vis-à-vis the type of film stock being used. All of my footage had been exposed at the wrong color temperature. Fortunately, the Color Corrected file had removed this issue and salvaged the footage.

So now without further ado, here is the 2016 Bellingham Procession of the Species, recorded entirely on Super 8. I want to thank all of the organizations that made this project possible, and all of the Furlife fursuiters who came out to be a part of making history. Will I shoot on Super 8 again? This remains an expensive and impractical medium to use with regularity. However, I do still have that one cartridge of unexposed film sitting in the downstairs cooler, so never say never...

And now, here is what happens when you add a period-appropriate soundtrack...