WESTCLIFF FILM & VIDEO CLUB

THE MARCH OF TIME

Westcliff’s longest-standing member, Chris Taylor remembers the changing technology used by members over the last 40 years

It was in September of 1965 that I joined what was then the Westcliff Cine and 35mm Club. I had invested a huge amount of my student earnings to buy a Bolex C8 cine camera and a new-fangled Eumig Mark S sound projector and wanted to know how best to use them. In those days the 8mm cine film was shot silent, and if a real enthusiast wanted to add sound it was done using a tape recorder. The new concept of adding a sound stripe to the film was controversial, as quality was ‘iffy’ to say the least.

Back at the club I soon found that my new equipment was rather rare and I found myself sharing my experiences with the handful of members who had embraced the new technology. Before long, far from learning from them, I found myself being a leader of much experimentation with the new equipment.

The club’s star movie-maker of the time was family man, Ron McEwen who used a silent projector linked to a tape recorder with a synchroniser attachment which kept pictures and sound more-or-less in step. The ability for amateurs to shoot talking pictures – lip synch – was unheard of. 

In 1965 Kodak introduced a new film gauge called Super 8 which had smaller sprocket holes and somewhat bigger picture frames. It ran a touch faster and therefore offered improvements in pictures and sound. The price, for 3 minutes and 20 seconds of running time of about £1.50 was hefty for an apprentice earning about £10 per week!  

Kodak later introduced a version of Super 8 which enabled the sound to be recorded directly onto the film in the camera.    Lip synch had arrived at last !    The trouble was that the cameras of the day recorded the clickety-click of the film transport as much as they did the wanted sound, and this noise was a real problem.  Westcliff members masked such camera noise remarkably well and some of them became well known names in the amateur  movie world as experts in their particular fields.  Member, and one time Chairman, Tom Hardwick, was renowned for achieving Super 8 picture quality which belied the tiny frame size, and because of his single-shot roving camera shooting style, was nicknamed ‘One shot Tom’.  Another member Terry Mendoza created several award winning and professional looking movies in this gauge, and yours truly, Chris Taylor, wrote the sound column Sound Spectrum in Movie Maker Magazine.  Perhaps Westcliff’s best known regular member, the late John Wright championed the use of sound striped 8mm film with the  Back Stripe campaign he ran in his Club Commentary column, again in Movie Maker.   

A few Westcliff members used the 16mm professional film gauge for a time, but its size and cost meant that the number of films appearing the gauge was few. 

As the 1980’s arrived, the use of video in the home drove members to think about shooting their movies using video cameras.  The earliest cameras were attached by cable to shoulder hung full-size VHS recorders which produced results which left a lot to be desired especially when the tapes were edited, as this process resulted in a generation loss which VHS was not able to sustain.  Editing itself involved copying from one video machine to another and early examples were unable to produce clean or correctly timed cuts.   

Despite all this, the process became increasingly popular as compact cameras with smaller VHS, and the Sony counterpart Video 8,  tapes were introduced. Another of Westcliff’s leading members, the late Peter Davison was a great champion of the use of video, especially after one-piece camcorders appeared on the market.   The introduction of the higher standards of Super VHS and Hi-8 recording finally saw the demise of the use of Super 8 film by members of the Club. 

In the 1980’s Westcliff changed its’ name to Westcliff Film & Video Club to reflect the higher profile of video within its activities and the majority of members put their movies together by shooting the raw footage on a camcorder and editing the material using two synchronised VHS video recorders.  Some of the techniques required to build a complex sound track remained tricky, but many award winning videos were produced by Westcliff members including some by family film maker Nigel Woodham who was featured in Jeremy Beadle’s home-movie based TV programmes. 

The computer then began to make its presence felt in the world of amateur movies and the earliest systems were used to control the video recorders on which the movie was being edited.  For some years it was not possible to store movie material of sufficient quality on the computer itself.  This programme material had to remain on tape and some members used their computers mainly for titling and similar ancillary tasks.    As the computer progressed, it became capable of more and more complex image manipulation and Westcliff members realised the tremendous opportunities offered by such programmes as Adobe Premiere and the associated hardware from such manufacturers as Canopus and Pinnacle, which enable moving pictures to be captured and stored for editing.   

As this technology progresses, Westcliff continues to keep abreast of it and this is much evident from the Programme which appears elsewhere in our website. Today Westcliff’s leading members shoot their movies using digital video cameras, edit them on the ‘timeline’ on a computer, and output them to DVD.   But tomorrow?….. who knows. That’s where the wonderful world of Westcliff Film and Video Club comes in, keeping members up to date on that jet propelled march of technology!