part 1: sync

guest expert: will cummock, one half of directing double act will & george 

straight 8 soundtracking is an artform all of its own - you don’t get a chance to see your film before you make the soundtrack. then, when you do submit your soundtrack, they start it at the first exposed frame of your film

so matching sound to picture is tough

and proper sync recording is even tougher, no-one’s managed it yet despite some very determined attempts. it's especially tricky because:

1. most 30 year old super 8 cameras don’t run at exactly 18fps

2. there are a variable number of “dead frames” at the start of roll of film, this may only vary by 1-2 frames (an 1/18 to 1/9 of a second), but that’s enough to ruin lip sync.

3. even on more accurate cameras and those with crystal sync motors, you can lose or gain a frame or two when you stop/start the camera between shots

but there are many cunning ways to try to get your sound to fit with your picture. here are six straight 8 soundtrack sync strategies (in no particular order):

1. the footage counter

you can get a rough idea of how much you've filmed for each scene by regularly checking the footage counter on your camera. in my experience these footage counters are not to be trusted however. apart from number 6 below, this is probably the least accurate way of working out your timings

having said that there are probably some cameras out there with super-accurate counters, i just haven't had the pleasure of using one

2. stopwatch

the traditional approach is to use a stopwatch to carefully time each shot, then keep thorough notes. you need to be able to understand what your notes mean when you refer back to them much later -  so make them clear

we tried to do this a few times and would always keep bad notes/forget to start the stopwatch and etc. in the end we’d guess half of it and the film would end up hopelessly out of sync

here’s our first ever straight 8 entry as an example, we’d messed up the timings so badly that we missed off the entire ending. we knew it was gonna be messy so we just went for a frenetic music track and hoped for some serendipity. keep that in mind, this is "non-animatronic":

3. video assist

a more accurate, and less labour intensive technique is to use a video camera to film at the same time as your shooting on your super 8 camera

position the video camera close enough so that you can hear the motor running on the super 8. later, when you replay your video footage you’ll be able to hear exactly how long each shot ran for, whilst also seeing roughly what was shot. in 2009 we strapped a tiny camcorder to the side of our camera on a little steadicam rig that looked like this:

we managed to cut together a fairly accurate digital version of the film straight after the shoot. this is the super 8 version, "ransom":

4. animation

the most accurate, if time-consuming solution is to shoot the whole film one frame at a time with stop-frame animation, keeping careful track of the exact frame count as you go

this is a challenging way to shoot and requires a load of patience. mexican director diego arredondo does it masterfully in "tequila chamuco":

5. geekery

giles perkins, the man behind onsuper8.org put together an awesome device for getting his sync bang-on. he explains it much better than i can in his article called perfect timing for single cart?

the question mark at the end of the title is there for a reason. the theory is rock solid, but when it came to the shoot, something didn’t quite work out. still a cool film, with a bold, if doomed attempt at lip sync, "wees shews are these shews"

6. gamble

have fun, guess, use your “intuition”, consult your psychic, stare at tea-leaves, hope for the best...

this is the traditional will & george approach, and when we teamed up with nick rutter and co to make this years entry, we were having far too much fun for stopwatches and legible notes

the sound synced up impossibly well considering. that isn’t to say we recommend this approach, but we got away with it in "from russia with monsters":