Why everyone should make a Super 8 movie

Running since 1999, Straight 8 is a beloved filmmaking initiative that challenges entrants to shoot a roll of Super 8 film using only in-camera editing, with no grading and no sync sound. Filmmakers send their exposed film cartridge, along with a soundtrack, to the Straight 8 team, who process the film at Cinelab Film + Digital, and line up the soundtracks (which are made separately). Twenty-five entries are shortlisted for a public screening, and the filmmaking teams then see the finished film for the first time with a live audience. The annual competition continues to be a springboard for emerging talent as well as a sandbox for established filmmakers.

A collection of Straight 8 films, including works by Edgar Wright, Lee Hardcastle and Alice Lowe were selected for long-term preservation in the BFI National Archive, where they join the national collection of film and TV. Ahead of the 2022 competition premiere at BFI Southbank on 22 October we sat down with Straight 8 founder Ed Sayers to discuss the enduring appeal of shooting on film, the importance of community and peer pressure in filmmaking, and why everyone should make a Straight 8 movie. 

What started it, and what makes it what it is today, is the community aspect. It started because I wanted to try and make a film on one roll of Super 8 without having to edit it – to just stick it on the projector and see if there was something coherent and watchable on that three minutes and 20 second long reel. It was a night in 1997 when I had this epiphany that I was going to, at some point, make a short film in this way, but two years later I still hadn’t done it. Then in 1999 I suddenly thought, if I could get a few mates to do it, if we all had a deadline and we all watched the finished films together, then perhaps that peer pressure would force me to finally make the film. 

I asked a bunch of people working in commercials, where I was then a young producer, if they wanted to try and make a film on one roll of Kodachrome 40 Super 8mm. And in the end 22 people said yes. And I finally made that film. The power of community gets you to do things. And a lot of people that enter Straight 8 do so in groups.

Everybody, even if they’re too young to remember its provenance, has a fondness for Super 8. It’s a friendly stock that feels familiar and accessible. That might be because it’s been used to film families on picnics, at the beach, or kids going on their first holidays. The look is just so ingrained in our brains that even if you’re 17 years old now, and even if your parents didn’t use Super 8, you somehow still relate to it. 

With Straight 8 we’re offering people the opportunity to have a safe space to fail. We try to use that friendly format to make something that’s a little piece of cinema. Film is one of the most collaborative artistic mediums because it requires a lot of people to make anything even semi-ambitious. You’re not going to do much on your own without any actors or anyone else to move the camera or move a prop or drive a car. We offer people the chance to own that big silver screen for 3 minutes 20 seconds, and we don’t set a brief. All the limitations are technical.

It’s taking a small, delicate, home movie format, but in presentation elevating it into something epic – like putting it in a massive gilt frame and hanging it in the National Gallery, but it’s only someone’s rough sketch. That’s what’s really exciting about it. And then of course, you have to embrace the pain of being there with a live audience and not knowing how well it’s going to come out. Everybody sees it with you.

We get between 100 and 200 entries each year, and from those we shortlist 25, which is really hard. We then ask our jury, which includes the likes of Mark Jenkin, Asif Kapadia, Robbie Ryan and more, to select the eight joint-winning films from that shortlist. We don’t set a brief and we’re genre agnostic, but we try to select films that we feel will get a strong reaction from our audiences.

We get documentaries, we get schlock horror, we get comedies, we get animation – highly technical ones, simple ones, one-shot wonders. We just care that it makes you feel something at the end. Do you want to move the audience? Do you want to make them laugh? Is there a twist at the end? Is the biggest gag at the end? 

We get a bit of everything. In our top eight this year we’ve got a 21-year-old guy based in Brazil who’s never directed a film before and never shot on film. He made a Super 8 film; it’s really beautiful, it made our top eight, and when I told him that on an Instagram Live, he had tears in his eyes! 

Quite often we tour the winning films around the world at different festivals. This year’s shortlist includes two films from India, six from five different US states as well as our first entries from Brazil, Latvia and Israel. Since 2003 the eight winning films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival and we’ve hosted screenings at Slam Dance in Utah, in Canada, India and soon, Brazil.

In the last normal year before the pandemic a really lovely Australian film called Rumours made our top eight, which we screen at Cannes Film Festival. The filmmaker Ollie Birt was rejected from pretty much every film school, and he was nearly going to give up on filmmaking until he heard about Straight 8 and decided to enter. When he discovered his film was going to screen at Cannes his mom set up a GoFundMe to get the nine-strong team from Australia to Cannes. They ended up bringing his mum with them as passenger 10, ‘travel producer’. There was a great Australian news piece about his film. And when he reapplied to film schools with renewed vigour and an updated reel, he got accepted to the Australian Film Television and Radio School.

It’s really easy to sign up to, so do that and then worry about what the hell you’re going to make later. That’s what we all did in 1999. Signing up puts pressure on you to get a film made, and takes the pressure off being able to make it perfect. Come to the public screenings to see how the audience react to different Straight 8s. And while you’re sitting there, you’ll probably think, “I can do better than half of these films.” Well then, that’s great, do better than that! 

My tip would be either do it for fun and team up with people you like, or if you want to take your filmmaking more seriously, think about your voice and who you want to be as a filmmaker, then use your Straight 8 as a sketch for the kind of films you want to make. So that when your first feature goes ballistic and your archive is explored by the media, they can see the ‘story’ of you as a filmmaker.

In 2020 a first assistant director called Carlotta Beck Peccoz made a Straight 8 documentary called A Portrait about Christopher Hughes who was Derek Jarman’s cinematographer and friend. In the film, Christopher talks about wanting to experiment with film because with an experiment there is no wrong answer, there is just an answer. 

I think you just have to make a Straight 8. Make films with your community and your friends – just play, that’s my biggest piece of advice.

The global premiere of Straight 8 is on 22 October at BFI Southbank.