Monohaus

I will be producing a new open series of short films for online distribution to showcase the beauty, ease and accessibility of shooting fun and interesting projects on Super8 film.

THE PROCESS

Each video will be shot on a single 50’ roll of Kodak Super8 film and consist of a voice-over interview of the video’s main subject. Subjects will vary based on the person/people in each story but some examples will include: Artists, photographers, musicians, athletes (motorcycle racing, skateboarding, climbing, etc.) trades-people (barbers, baristas, woodworkers, butchers, etc).

My Goal:

I want to encourage viewers to use film to capture their lives, where they live and to tell the stories of the people around them. To help accomplish this goal, I will also be producing behind-the-scenes content along with the main features to help show viewers how they can achieve similar results using Super8 film. In time we will expand the scope and scale of the project to include 16mm film projects with accessible cameras to help guide users into incorporating more film into their personal lives and projects.

I would love to help be a small part in getting more people to fall in love with film. Over the past few years that I have been making videos about film in my spare time I have received countless emails from people expressing their gratitude to me for making content that encouraged them to get out their old gear and shoot film, or to dust off their slide projector and go through old carousels together.

FAMILY MATTERS

In my darkroom at home sits a 1962 Kodak Brownie 8mm camera with matching projector. And it belonged to my grandpa Edward Oliver Cassella, “Eddie”. He was a lover of movie cameras, hi-fi systems, Louis Prima and snacking on milk bone dog biscuits. When I was a kid, I remember seeing some of his 8mm footage from the mid-sixties. I saw my grandfather as a young man, my mom only a few years old, out on the lake as a family on a summer day. Life was condensed to eight millimeters and flickered by as the projector ticked.

Unfortunately today those films have since been lost due to damage from poor storage and neglect, but as long ago as I saw that footage I still haven’t forgot about what I saw or the impression it left on me…and the camera and projector work just as well today as they did 60 or so years ago.

A few years after he died, I was moving out of my parents house after school and in the garage I saw the old Brownie 8mm camera and projector sitting on the shelf. “Who’d miss it?” I thought to myself and I quietly put them in the car. I waited years for my phone to ring and to get an earful about taking them, but no call ever came. When I finally came clean years later we all had a laugh about it as I have a habit of “stealing” photographs, negatives and old Kodachrome slides from home as I see my self as the family archivist. But my family knows my affection for film and the attention I take to archiving and storing my own negatives as well as our family photographs. And given what happened to our precious family 8mm films we didn’t want any further damage to be done to the remaining photographs.

In an old box one day I did find one photograph from that same day at the lake from the destroyed film and it’s never failed to start the flickering movie in my mind again.

I want to convey to people that shooting film is more than the sum of taking a picture…because as lovers of film know - it does more than capture light, it captures our hearts, our memories, our lives.