This is a Modern Car Race Shot with a 1968 Super 8 Camera

A guy named Nick Shirrell recently attended a car race, but instead of shooting it with a modern camera, he brought along a Canon Super 8 camera that was launched back in 1968. As you can see in the resulting 3.5-minute video above, the results were delightful.

Shirrell shares that he shot the For the Sake of Racing event on April 20th at the Gingerman Raceway in Michigan using a Canon 1218 Super 8mm camera loaded with Kodak 50D and Kodak 200T film (which he paid about $35 per roll for). He shot two 50-foot rolls, which was about 3.5-minutes of footage each at 18 frames per second.

The Auto Zoom 1218 Super 8. Photo by Canon.

After the event, Shirrell sent his film to the CineLab motion picture lab in Massachusetts and paid about $50 to develop and scan each 8mm roll. The digitized footage he got back was then trimmed and spliced in Adobe Premiere Pro, but no digital effects were used to fake or adjust things like color, film grain, and particles.

Still frame from video by Nick Shirrell
Still frame from video by Nick Shirrell
Still frame from video by Nick Shirrell

Shirrell is planning to share more of these videos on a weekly basis through his Instagram account, @filmgrainandoctane, so give it a follow if you’d like to keep up with the project.

A couple of years ago, photographer Joshua Paul of Lollipop Magazine did something similar on the still photography side of things by shooting F1 racing with a 1913 Graflex 4×5 view camera.

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