Heres a film about a house Ive been obsessed with for more than two years.

A house that I know is haunted!

After 5 years Ive completed Ladyfest Cambridge 2007! For most of that time the footage just sat on my hard-drive with me doing nothing.

Shot on Super 8 Tri-X, I wanted to explore the limits of this medium. I think that train hit the buffers, careered across the sidings and into the orphanage.

Also notice the poorly recorded sync sound, recorded by yours truly.

Consider my lovely Nizo 561 Macro.

At 24fps the shutter speed will be 1/60s

And at 24fps with 200ASA Tri-X in the camera and on a sunny day the f-stop is about f/16 (I just checked this).

So the Sunny 16 rule says to correctly expose a sunny scene with 200ASA film, we need f/16 @ shutter speed 1/250s and this is 2 stops under what my Nizo is actually doing, f/16 @ shutter speed 1/60s.

I’ve been puzzling over this and I think Ive found the answer in the November 1975 edition of American Cinematographer which I found on this webpage about Super 8 Sound.

On page 1255, The Case Against Professional Super-8, it says,

A Super-8 camera/lens using the beam-splitter system will lose better than one stop and sometimes as much as two stops in the lens/finder optics.

and thats it!

The two stops are lost in the viewfinder which splits off some light so you can see whats going on, and also in the optics and the light-meter.

So if your manually setting the f-stop on your Super 8 camera, you may well have to add between 1 and 2 stops to your f-stop to get an adequate exposure.

Addendum

I’ve found this note on bracketing the above effect on the nano lab website.

Ive made a new one minute film, PARTY.

Shot on Tri-X Super 8 at a friends party, its another experiment in AutomB.

With a knowledge of the exposure value of a scene, you don’t need a light-meter to work out a good exposure.

I took the test shots below at night next to our local train track under sodium street lighting.

Ive been interviewed on the no entry fee festivals blog.

The no entry fee festivals is a blog listing film festivals from across the world, that have no submission fee to enter! Its a fantastic idea and everybody at Cambridge Cinema Shorts wishes them the best of luck.

Check out this spooky short made with a DIY ND filter and find out what my friends in the woods want me to do!

Check out my new short film shot on a Eumig Nautical under the water!

Film submissions are invited for the 13th Strawberry Shorts Film Festival and those short-listed will be entered into our competitive programme vying for a chance to win La Fraise d’Or.

Strawberry Shorts is a well established and respected short film festival and an important event in the Cambridge calender. It enjoys national support and has international recognition. Each year we try to add a little extra, keeping it fresh and alive, and encouraging continued interest with year round supporting events.

There will be two categories, Best Overall Festival Winner and Best Local Short Film, (we feel we have a duty to encourage local film makers). There are two awards for each category, The Audience Award and The Jury Award – with the winners being announced at the end of the evening.

Films can be of any genre but should be less than 20 minutes long. There is no submission fee.

Close of entry is Saturday 20th April.

The festival will be held on Friday 31st May and entry will be on a first come, first served basis. All audience members will receive voting slips on arrival so they can vote for The Audience Awards . Further details of venue and times will be available closer to date, so please continue to visit our web site for information and news on this and other forthcoming events.

For entry details please visit the Cambridge Cinema Shorts web site: http://cinema-shorts.org

For information on Strawberry Fair please visit: http://www.strawberry-fair.org.uk

Shot in 2007 and completed this year 2012, check out the title sequence on my latest short film.