The facilities house I selected for the work had a long history in UK filmmaking and broadcasting at an address on Wardour Street, previously having been Soho Images and other businesses, but it was called Deluxe when I visited in July 2011. It was a strange experience having my ‘private’ Super 8 films laced up on an expensive Ursa Diamond telecine machine by a professional more used to working for television, music videos and advertising. The films had only been seen by myself and close friends, either projected or on a small hand-cranked viewer, now they (and I) were being treated like royalty, no expense spared. The telecine operator reported he had been digitising the film collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for months prior to my booking. The realisation that my films were worthy of the same treatment as a nation’s collection perhaps affected my relationship to my Super 8 films. It is hard to recall with certainty what I felt about the film collection before this time, but the grant application to have it digitised suggests that I considered it justified the attention, even if the thinking had not been fully articulated.
In preparation for the telecine, I had joined most of the 50ft rolls using a tape splicer to make larger 400 and 800ft spools to speed up the transfer process because Deluxe was charging by the hour. This was not an entirely orderly process, as many of the rolls were unlabelled and uncatalogued. Only when the mailer envelopes had project identification could the films be collated so that the larger reels had films running in a logical order. This splicing had changed the nature of the collection. Now there were longer running films with strange and interesting subject juxtapositions and jumps in time, instead of the camera rolls that would previously been loaded into a projector one-at-a-time, then each one experienced as a discrete visual piece reflecting, in a sense, the way they had been shot. The cartridge is loaded into the camera, exposed over a certain length of time – maybe minutes, maybe weeks – and then removed, so the filming is, in a sense, compartmentalised. The running time for 50ft at 18 frames per second is around 3 minutes 20 seconds which affords a particular viewing experience compared with ‘normal’ cinema – the screening is necessarily stop-start with the lights coming up to allow the next roll to be loaded into the projector. The compiled reels had created portmanteau movies which had previously not existed, and these were transferred to standard definition DigiBeta tape and later captured to external hard disks. The transfer process was smooth once the spliced film spool was laced on to the telecine machine.
The telecine suite was soundproofed and dark, coolly air-conditioned in contrast to the sweaty heat of the Soho summer outside. The films appeared on the expensive video monitors as the technician adjusted the colour balance and exposure, smoothly rewinding if I requested any changes. This was an entirely new way for me to experience the footage, and my understanding of the material, and my relationship to it had changed. This professional, hands-off, somewhat rarefied experience of the footage underlined the shift from physical film to digital, ‘amateur’ to professional, private to public.
As the years passed, there were huge advances in video technology which had two contradictory ramifications. First, the professional use of film workflows rapidly diminished, causing Deluxe Soho, among others, to be reconfigured as dry-hire Avid edit suites, losing all its telecine facilities before being shut down entirely by its American owners.