Cinematographer Gives an 8mm Camcorder From the 1950s a New Digital Life
Filmmaker and cinematographer Tom Kucy, who runs the YouTube channel Manual Not Found, took apart a classic 1950s era Sankyo 8-R film camera and gave it a new, surreal digital life.
Kucy explores the history of the Sankyo 8-R camera, his personal connection to it, and his restoration project to make it a digital motion picture camera in an exceptionally well-made video, “Memory, Remade: A Sankyo 8-R Story.”
“The main motivation [for the project] was taking this dusty object that had been sitting on my bookshelf, essentially a novelty, and breathing some real new life into it,” Kucy tells PetaPixel over email.
“I’m a huge fan of the 8mm film look, but the truth is, the cost for 8mm film stock is just too prohibitive for me to play with and experiment with casually. Converting the camera to digital allowed me to engage with the history of these old turret cameras, perhaps even injecting myself into that history,” he continues.
Although the project itself offered many challenges, including gutting the camera, designing and 3D-printing the necessary components, and performing all the required coding and wiring, Kucy says the biggest challenge was actually starting at all.
“The most challenging part of the build was simply making the decision to start in the first place,” the filmmaker and cinematographer explains. “It felt like a truly daunting task to begin disassembling a device like this. There is no manual for that (call back to my channel name!)”
Kucy says the whole schtick of his channel is approaching his projects with an open and curious mind and acquiring new skills.
As for the technical specifics, Kucy wanted to preserve the camera’s original lens but pair it with a modern digital image sensor and the required electronic components. In this case, Kucy opted for a tiny CMOS sensor that was originally inside a drone’s camera system.
Turning the Sankyo 8-R into a digital camera may have removed some of the camera’s former analog charm — there is truly something special about the old 8mm film, as Kucy’s video shows — but it has made the camera usable again for him.
“Real film is hard to beat or emulate, but I absolutely love the feeling of a digital Sankyo,” Kucy tells PetaPixel. “I’m a camera guy, so having another unique camera in the mix is exciting.”
Although he doesn’t miss the immense cost of shooting 8mm film, he does miss the haptic feedback of the camera’s old winding mechanism and the vibration it made as it ran film through its complex internal mechanisms.
“That satisfying, mechanical vibration and the feedback of knowing you are actively filming is now replaced by a small red status LED,” Kucy laments. “I’ve shot digital video professionally for years, so I am not super heartbroken though.”
Image credits: Tom Kucy (Manual Not Found)
