Super 8

Super 8 is what a family holiday looked like for twenty years, so the format carries the feeling before the content does. Anything shot this way reads as somebody's past.

The colour is part of it. Reversal stock renders warm and saturated with hard contrast, so skin glows and shadows block up, and nothing on it looks neutral.

Kodak put the film in a drop in cartridge in 1965 and made the sprocket holes smaller, which gave the frame about half again the area of 8mm.

Cameras ran at 18 frames per second rather than 24. The motion is slightly quick and slightly stepped, and that cadence is as recognisable as the grain.

The faults come from the cartridge and the plastic body. Light leaks in at the edge, dust prints as white specks, and the frame weaves in the gate.

Use it for nostalgia, for a title sequence, for a montage that stands outside the main timeline, and for a music video that wants warmth without a grade.

Skip it for anything current. The format is so tied to its decades that it reads as a flashback whatever is in the frame.

8mm is the older, smaller gauge. It is grainier, softer and closer to square, and its colour is duller.

Film grain on its own is a texture. Super 8 is a whole set of behaviours: the weave, the cadence, the leaks and the contrast come together or the shot reads as a filter.

Super 8 was the family format from the late 1960s onward, and film makers kept buying it long after video replaced it. A montage cut on Super 8 still reads as a home movie to an audience that has never held a cartridge.

The model returns clean footage with a warm grade. Name the weave, the light leak and the grain together, because the colour alone is the easiest part to fake.

The other failure is modern motion. Say 18 frames per second or ask for slightly stepped movement, so the cadence matches the grain.