From: Freya (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Jan 22 2010 - 12:44:11 PST
> Contrasting super8 cameras/projectors to hi-end HD cameras
> isn't a fair comparison . You can get a flip video
> camera (I think the closest equivalent to a brownie), for
> around $50 on ebay or craigslist, and they have a built-in
> simple editor/uploader to allow for sharing and easy
Yes a while back I started making an experimental video on a cheap £10 digigr8 camera. I was really liking the results too! It has a strange look of it's own and it is a tiny camera you can just take anywhere! The batteries get eaten in about 3 minutes or less tho! ;) Sadly I think I may have lost that along with much of the other things I started to try and make the last 3 years.
> distribution. Also pointing to the pixel vision cameras
> (infamously used by Sadie Benning, of course), can show how
> "cheap" video can be incredibly moving (even if
> Sadie potentially could have afforded a "better"
> camera).
A better video camera than the pxl, have they made one yet? ;)
I would question how cheap the pxl really is these days too, as pxl cameras are expensive when you can get hold of them at all. Here in PAL land, it is especially expensive. My current set-up is a pxl, feeding a signal amp into an american canon HV20 high definition camera. (The irony!)
Not cheap but I love the pxl look.
Having said that, I have in the past recorded directly onto cassette and fed the output into a cheap £10 tv card in a computer, and on another occasion a very old apple powermac with analogue video inputs. The cassette drive is becoming more and more unreliable tho.
I think whether you are working in film or video, you can work very cheaply. As someone pointed out you could probably even pull a couple of old VHS recorders out the trash and hook up something to that, or even better find an old laptop off e-bay for £50 or something and add a £5 usb web camera to it. OTOH with film, you could shoot short lengths of reversal in Super8 or even make painted film on tranparent leader. At the econmically limited end of things, the work is always affected by the means at your disposal but then that forces you to be even more creative.
I'm a film fan but you have to work within the constraints you have at the time.
love
Freya
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.