framing Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Ed Sayers – 2025 – UK – Cert. PG – 82m

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The process of shooting the natural world on the Super 8 amateur home movie format of the 1970s brings a participating community of people closer to nature – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 4th

This starts and ends with the image zooming in to and zooming out from Super 8 footage. The Kodak Super 8 system was the premier format for home movies in the late1960s through the 1970s before it was replaced for the most part by videotape in the 1980s.

For some years, Ed Sayers was involved in a Super 8 film competition wherein punters would enter their films, and most of the material was much the same – family memories or holiday footage. Some of it extremely wild. As he puts it, the medium “painted our memories on film.”

One year, a very different submission turned up from a Frenchman named Roger. Roger had shot footage of flamingoes.

The nature of Super 8 was that the film came on little cartridges of reversal film inserted into the camera. In terms of footage, the cartridges didn’t run that long. You’d shoot by squeezing the trigger, which would stop filming when released. … Read the rest

Oppenheimer

Director – Christopher Nolan – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 180m

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Drama about the father of the atomic bomb, shot with IMAX cameras and best watched in IMAX 70mm format – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 21st

There are certain hallmarks to Christopher Nolan’s feature length movies. Since The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), his second Batman movie, he has been shooting a proportion of each one with IMAX cameras. Seen projected on a screen the size of three double-decker London buses at London’s BFI Waterloo IMAX, these are larger than life experiences in a way that movies shown in the viewer’s own home on a screen, even a large one, can never be. And while Nolan is interested in character and performance, most of his movies in the IMAX format, even the historically inspired WW2 movie Dunkirk (Nolan, 2017), contain memorable action, exploiting the vastness of the IMAX screen to great kinetic effect whether it’s Batman roaring along on the Batbike, co-conspirators free floating inside a falling transit van in Inception (Nolan, 2010) or British WW2 soldiers trapped inside a flooding ship.

There is, however, a problem with watching Nolan’s IMAX-intended films in a lesser theatrical cinema format: the framing.… Read the rest