Fix it in Pre When You Shoot on Super 8

Written by Max Mir

Everybody shoots digitally these days—or at least, that’s the assumption. The good ‘ol filmmaking days of shooting on celluloid are not entirely over, but they’re increasingly unreachable for emerging filmmakers, especially due to the high impact that film scanning and processing can have on a production’s budget.

that’s not all bad: filmmaking is becoming more and more accessible. Thanks to new and powerful compact cinema and DSLR cameras, filmmakers who are ready to invest in their careers can now access a very decent kit (and hold on to it for a considerable amount of years). Nonetheless, there is a detail often overlooked in the age of modern filmmaking which I feel most of us have taken for granted:

Being able to shoot take, after take, after take. Or, as I like to call it:
the curse of endless takes.

Nowadays, if you have ample storage space, you can easily plan out your shots for the day, and repeatedly shoot the same shot over and over until you’re satisfied or the 1st AD calls for your head.

Back in the day, you could hear the reel spitting out your budget every time you rolled the camera, and that constant reminder was enough to stop you from fooling around during your planning time.

Takes were too precious. The stakes were too high. Have you ever noticed yourself shooting too many takes on a particular shot?

I definitely have, and my feeling is that the option to do so has—unconsciously or not—completely affected the way I approach a shoot.

Until I came across Straight 8.

"Lemonade Stand-Off"Courtesy of Max Mir

Straight 8 is an international filmmaking competition where participants must shoot a film within one roll of super 8mm film.

See where this is going? No second takes, no editing—just you, your camera, and your extensive planning.

How would you approach this? If you’re a filmmaker, does this seem exciting to you? I had never shot on film, and in my eyes, this was an incredible opportunity to do so. Letting go of that attachment to multiple takes, and your classic "fix it in post" mentality to the far less common (much wiser) "fix it in pre!" is a daunting task for modern filmmaking practices. That being said, it ended up completely changing my creative mindset.

To show you what I mean, I’d like to take you through what the process of shooting a Straight 8 film is like, and how I believe it can shake up the way you approach your next project (especially if you tend to shoot digitally).

There are approximately three minutes and 20 seconds in one roll of super 8mm film. That’s not too bad—generally speaking, we could allocate one minute each to our beginning, middle, and end, leaving the final 20 seconds as a ‘margin of error’.

Compare this to your past projects. When asked about runtime, I’m sure you’ve caught yourself saying, "I think it’ll be 10 minutes… maybe 13… we’ll see."

With Straight 8, there’s no speculating. I think that’s fascinating.

If you mess up on a shot, you have to keep going. There’s no turning back—your choices are either to amend the mistake, or completely ignore it, and hope that the audience forgives you. With your runtime set in stone, the first step is simple: what’s your story? What do you want to communicate, or to portray, in just three minutes?

"Lemonade Stand-Off"Courtesy of Max Mir

In 2023, I directed "Lemonade Stand-Off" with my good friends Matthew Poole and Kanhaiya Trivedi. The film followed two lemonade sellers who compete to gain control over their sales area. Short, silly, and simple. The idea came from our usual routine: we go to the pub and we brainstorm. It’s a bit chaotic, as you might expect, but it gets us there eventually.

Collaborating with fellow directors is an amazing thing to do, the best of all worlds is thrown into a creative blender, and while you might not always agree on some creative decisions, in the end it’s all worth it.

In the case of "Lemonade", we all agreed we wanted to make something slapstick inspired by Tom & Jerry. We had already explored the physical humor of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in a past entry, and since your Straight 8 will most likely be a silent film accompanied by a score, we’ve always been big believers in very visual, absurdist humor. And we love Tom & Jerry.

Now, onto the real challenge. Script in hand, we begin to meticulously dissect every element of the story.

Fair warning: if you decide to co-direct, this is the part in the process where you can expect to have many, many arguments. But that’s part of the fun.

As a director, you dictate where the camera goes, its movement, and the action in front of it. In any project—but particularly in the case of a Straight 8, every shot needs to exist for a reason.

So we constantly questioned our decisions: what does this shot do? What actions will it cover? Ok, that one covers the salesman choking on a hot dog. If we extend the shot one extra second in order to fit in a whip pan, does that make it funnier? Or are we wasting one second?

Shot listing a Straight 8 is like going to a science lab, formulating a hypothesis, and testing it out in an experiment that might explode in your face or give you the craziest film you’ve ever made. Every shot was there for a reason. Even the big-ticket shots, like shooting a lemon flying across the sky and then hitting our protagonist, had to be worth the risk.

Once everything was decided, our talented storyboard artist (Elena Righi, also one of the writers) made sense of our mess in clear, detailed drawings. This is what we used to create our digital run.

Ah, digital runs. The irony, huh?

Unless you’re shooting a project with loads of action and/or stunts, or something that is very VFX heavy, digital runs probably don’t make much sense for your project .

But for Straight 8, they’re essential.

"Lemonade Stand-Off"Courtesy of Max Mir

We're not actors, but sometimes you just have to act. I grew up with a mime (true story) so I was chosen to play the protagonist, while co-director Kanhaiya played the second lemonade seller.

With the storyboards as our bible, we shot the entire film, counting aloud the seconds that we had allocated to each shot, and making sure our actions fit within the times. This often turns into an incredible creative playground. When you’re finally there, acting out the world you’ve only seen on paper for so long, that’s when new ideas and actions arrive.

Then, you edit together your digital run—and, if you’re like me, you hold your breath while waiting to see if it works or not.

When it comes to Straight 8, the digital run is the final film. This is the moment to adjust any seconds, remove one here, add one there…

We’re mainly looking out for the pace of the story—does it flow well? Is it funny? Is it clear? We’re trying to fix all of these things throughout our pre-production because we know we have no post-production. The closest thing we have is our composer, Samuel GR Morgan, creating a score from scratch without seeing the roll, and sending that over to the lab, where they will then sync it to the first frame of the film.

Once we’re happy, it’s time to shoot! Our Straight 8’s have always been a massive collaborative effort, as we want to get as many creative heads in it as possible in order to make the best film we can. Too many cooks? Not in our case!

On “Lemonade” we cast Josh Harvey and Amber Lily Payne as the lemonade sellers. Josh had already made one Straight 8 with us, so he was sort of familiar with the process, but even so it’s fascinating to see him and Amber break out of their accustomed acting workflows and act out their stories shot-by-shot. Like I said, there is no speculating on a Straight 8, so looking back at our completed digital run, we directed Josh and Amber within very specific time frames.

Working with actors is so much fun, especially when they understand their characters and suggest new directions or ideas. But remember, in a Straight 8, there’s no room for endless takes.

It’s one of the heartbreaking parts of the competition. The planning is so precise, even the smallest shift or change might accidentally increase a shot’s duration. Which leaves you with two options:

A) Stick to your plan and (sadly) reject their idea.

B) Agree to their idea and bring out the calculator.

I’m definitely on the side of "stick to your planning", but we’ve still been guilty of modifying our timings a handful of times. Josh and Amber both had such fresh perspectives on the story—and sometimes, an idea is just too good to turn down!

Often, these changes end up adding one or two seconds to your shot, which means you need to make up those seconds by cutting something down the line. It’s tricky, especially with so much going on in a set, but so far, we’ve been lucky.

"Lemonade Stand-Off"Courtesy of Max Mir

Now, you’re following all the rules, sticking to the complicated process of making a Straight 8. Our personal experience on "Lemonade" was a tough one—we like to buy the film but rent the camera. This time, our cinematographer Oscar Miño had very happily bought a Braun Nizo 801.

Everybody was excited to use it, until…. It jammed on our first shot. Oh well, that could’ve happened to anyone, let’s keep on going, this is Straight 8, after all. Until it jams again. Oscar hasn’t even let go of the trigger. What's going on?

We tried and tried and tried, and it got to that very frustrating point, where you start to feel like you’re being "forced" to make a film. It’s hard, but sometimes you’ve got to know when to quit and admit defeat, so we decided to postpone the shoot to another date.

Thankfully, that was very simple and we got together again very soon, this time with our go-to rental. If we hadn’t canceled in time, I don’t think the film would’ve been half as good as it was. We ended up winning that year!

During our second take (so to speak) on the challenge, everything went relatively smoothly. We rehearsed every shot with the actors involved, shouting out how many seconds it should last, until the action is settled and our cinematographer is happy.

And then… Remember when I was talking about having to weigh up your riskier shots? Well, most of ours worked…. There’s a shot of a slingshot’s POV targeting Amber, and upon setting up the shot, our DOP accidentally pressed the trigger. Ahhh… It happens! We have to keep moving forward and hope it’s not noticeable—thankfully, it isn’t.

Then, there’s the shot of Amber setting up a catapult and slamming her foot down on it to launch a lemon. This one worked perfectly in every. single. rehearsal. Of course, that meant that on the actual take, it didn’t work.

After adding a new shot to correct the mistake, we’d stolen three seconds… three seemingly infinite seconds that would have to be cut from somewhere else.

At the end of the day, we made a film by shooting it in one of the hardest possible ways. And what’s wild is that, unless you make the selection, you won’t see the final film! (until the next year’s competition starts, essentially). The first time you get to see it is with the audience, at a packed screening in the British Film Institute. Isn’t that scary?

I had never shot on film before, and making my first Straight 8 completely changed the way I creatively approach my projects.

Even though I still shoot on digital, (mostly due to financial constraints), I like to pretend I’m shooting on film anyway. Having the mindset to not take your shots for granted, really consider the meaning and purpose behind every single shot…

It sounds simple on paper, but how many short films or even features have you made (or watched) that include a random detail shot of someone’s eye? Or a shot of someone’s hand on a door handle just because they’re leaving their house? Those shots that add nothing whatsoever to the story? I’m sure you can think of a couple.

Filmmaking is incredibly hard, but for what it’s worth, I highly suggest you go out and shoot a short on a super 8 camera. It doesn’t have to be competitive like Straight 8. I’ll leave you with our very own "Lemonade Stand-Off" here, which hopefully convinces you to get out there and shoot out your imagination.

See if you can spot the mistakes I mentioned earlier…

You can watch "Lemonade Stand-Off" here.