I've had this Baby cassette for years but never had the equipment to watch it, but today I finally got round to digitising it with the DIY telecine
It says on the label: " Eric and Kath Going Away. Photos in the Garden."
The 9.5mm format was introduced in 1922 but the cameras were only made in 1923 and these French made Pathe Baby closed metal cassettes were the first type used. The sprocket holes in the film are quite rounded, which is a feature of the earlier film, I read. The cars, clothing and hats seem 1920s to me and this amateur film was almost certainly made in the 1920s, and possibly as early as 1923 or 1925!
The film was quite warped and bent in places so the telecine was not easy, but the final result has come out really quite well. It shows the couple leaving the wedding, then there is footage of the guests afterwards in the garden. Any lip readers out there who can work out what they are saying??
Amazing to think that the older people in the film, some of whom look in their 70s, were probably born in the 1850s. I love these Pathe Baby time capsules.
Here are some stills before the actual film:
Eric, in the glasses:
And Kath, smiling in the centre:
And here's the final film. It seems to work better with the link rather than the full embedded video, but here's both:
This is supposed to be a blog about 9.5 mm adventures but there will always be room here for other formats and experiments.
I bought this super c1933 Kinecam 6 camera - which takes 16mm film - a few months back, and I've had some success shooting B&W film and bucket developing it.
Last week I tried colour film developing for the first time with 20 feet from a large roll of movie film, Kodak Vision3. It doesn't say when it expired but I'm hoping the 08 sticker means it's 'only' 12 years out of date. At £20 postage free, for 400 feet, this is an absolute bargain, if I can get decent results from it, which as you will see below, I haven't so far...
Using the Tetenal C41 Kit at the alternative temperature of 30 degrees rather than 38 degrees, I got this result, using bucket development. Fail!
The negatives were extremely thin, and with a heavy blue cast, and worst of all, everything was blurred. The main problem is that the claw hadn't engaged with the film so every frame was streaked like this.
Some more research on the Vision 3 film revealed that standard C-41 processing is suboptimal at best, and disastrous at worst, as it's supposed to be developed using ECN-2 chemistry. The Eastman Colour Negative (ECN) process is the standard development method for all modern motion picture colour negative developing. Using C-41 can lead to thin negatives, unpredictable results and strange colour casts.
You can buy ECN-2 kits online but they are expensive for the small quantities I need, but RA4 chemistry can be used as a substitute, so I've ordered some of that to test out. Another suggestion is that Vision3 must be developed at the right temperature if you use C41, presumably that's 38 degrees, not the alternative 30 degrees.
Also, it's designed for indoor filming (T for Tungsten) so you need a filter for outdoor filming otherwise everything will be blue.
I got an 85B filter, held it in front of the lens and shot a few feet of some glass ornaments with the sun illuminating them from behind against the blue sky
then developed the film in C-41 at 38 degrees.
Result: fail again! The claw still wasn't engaging properly so everything is smeared. But the filter has helped with the colour cast, and although the negatives are still very thin, it's an improvement, of sorts:
And a close crop suggests the film is not too grainy:
For one filming session the claw actually engaged properly with the film, and using the 85B filter (but 30 degree development) there is a film to share! It's thin again, and it has lots of weird colour shifts, but hopefully this will be addressed by changing to RA4 chemistry next time, and developing at 38 degrees.
And on a positive note, I adapted a 1930s Mickey Mouse projector and it worked really well for the telecine:
Here are a couple of frames from it:
And here's the final video of the result. Only some very short sections could be saved in the telecine as some areas were too thin, so each clip is repeated to make it last.
Well it's a start, and things can only get better, as they say.
Another short test result for my Christmas day experiments with hand cranked c1923 Pathe Baby camera, and also a brief clip at the end, shot with a different Pathe Baby with the camo motordrive attachment:
Again developed in Perceptol stock solution and overexposure with the filming, and also overexposure with the digital capture in the telecine process, (corrected later to normal levels) to reduce the appearance of grain in the long expired Ferrania film.
Shot with the standard lenses and using the 1m and 0.5m push on lenses from a Pathe B.
The video link is below, but here are some single frames which better show the quality of the film before youtube compression. These frames of my nephews were shot with the 0.5m push on. The aperture was wide open on both cameras due to the very weak winter sun. Nice results considering sub-optimal conditions!
For many years I've dreamed of being able to make my own 9.5mm film, as it's no longer produced anywhere in the world. Als many years ago I bought a DIY hand crank music box. They come with a tiny punch which makes holes in the paper strips so you can make your own tune;
The punch cuts lovely holes in film:
But this makes round holes whereas 9.5mm film needs a rectangular sprocket hole of a very specific size and shape.
Or does it??
The punch is roughly the right width so maybe it would work, and it costs nothing to find out. I cut down some old strips of 16mm double perf, just roughly measured by eye:
then punched holes in the film, again just measuring roughly using the lines on the pad as a guide:
The punch did the job and the result looked lovely:
But could it possibly work in a camera?
I tried it in 3 different models, a c1923 hand cranked Pathe Baby, a c1933 motor driven Cine Nizo Model F, and a 1959 Prince. It worked perfectly in all three! And it also worked with the single shot function in the Prince.
I'm hoping the claw is catching the film consistently in the same place between the sprocket hole each time, and that it's roughly central to the hole so the frame isn't shifted up or down. Maybe this wouldn't work in a projector, but at the moment I just want to be able to use these wonderful old cameras with colour film, and I can telecine the results.
The next job is to automate the process a little more; at one punch every 5 seconds, I won't be going into commercial production any time soon...
Here's the video showing the 3 cameras, 2 clips repeated for clarity, and the single shot function at the end. Exciting times!
