Revisiting my old student film...

Having recently moved, I was going through a lot of old photos and videos, and rediscovered the original film print of my first student short, "8:00 a.m." I finally decided to splurge and have a new HD transfer made at FotoKem.

(Click here to see the short film.)

This was made while a student at Vassar College back in the spring of 1995. Shot on 16mm with two non-sync magnetic soundtracks, and cut entirely with only a single workprint -- using "cut-and-splice" editing and no post-production mixing or internegatives -- the film seems primitive compared to today's era of hi-def video and digital editing technology. And I'll be the first to admit that the film ain't perfect. Still, though, I'm proud of it, and it's been screened at various film festivals and television stations throughout the country, and once it was even screened in Australia.

The 16mm print had already been scratched to hell while at college (we played it over and over in the classroom), but the two magnetic sound tracks had deteriorated over nearly 25-years of storage, and were unuseable. The sound presented here, which was already of poor quality, had to be reconstructed from an old digibeta video transfer. The music tracks were added back in, but required a bit of tinkering, as the CD sources did not sync entirely with the timing of the original magnetic tapes.

Revisiting the film was a surreal experience, and brought back a lot of memories during my time at Vassar.