Super 8 Movies

When people ask me “How do I get a job in film and TV?”, my response is normally '“Just start making stuff yourself with whatever equipment you can lay your hands on.”

In my early 20s, I discovered my dad had an old Super 8 cine camera in the bottom drawer of his workshop. I took it to university, bought a few rolls of film and on weekends away would make little 3-minute slapstick comedies with whoever happened to be with me.

They took about 5 minutes to think up, the same again to get into whatever ‘costume’ was lying around, then we would just goof about and I would press RECORD while the action looked good then PAUSE when it petered out.

Because they were shot on Super 8 film, they were too fiddly to edit, so when the processed film arrived back from Kodak, we just loaded it into the projector, hung a bed-sheet up in the living room and screened it to an audience of random dinner guests.

With a bit of high-tempo 1920s piano playing in the background, everyone would fall about laughing and I believe at that moment I became a filmmaker. Everything else that happened afterwards was just an extension of that experimental journey,

So I say to people, don’t work your way slowly towards that moment, pondering feature film ideas and writing lengthy scripts. That’s like contemplating Everest before you’ve been on a hike. Better to just grab what you have to hand and make something within a day or over a long weekend – then you are off.

It can be total crap but if anyone laughs or groans when they watch it, you’re a filmmaker and nobody can argue with that!