Nothing quite like a pie fight filmed with it outdoors.

I haven't shot film in many moons... the costs surrounding such an undertaking are so monumental it would be hard to make reasonable when you can simulate it in post production. There's definitely something to be said for authenticity though. I collect arcade machines and I can feel the difference while playing between actual hardware and emulation, so I won't get the 1up machines that show up in Walmarts now. If there was a client who absolutely wanted that feel though, I'd be more than willing to make it happen if they were able to finance it.

I've thought about it. I have an electric Bolex that takes 400' loads. But film, processing, and scanning would be $500. That's just to get the footage to my computer. Add models, supplies and finishing and It would be an expensive scene to shoot.

I'm willing to take it on for a special client!

Love, love, love the look of 16mm film (think Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson) but wouldn't consider it for fetish filming at this point in the game. Expensive and artistic, perhaps best reserved for a well heeled customs client. Love the format for a pet project, though.

Bee

Mrs. Bee getting pied and slimed in 16mm film.....hmmmmmmm......Yup. I can see it.

Why 16mm, and not 35?

Aside from Raiders of the Lost Ark, once you get into 35= too many cooks.

High performance digital cinematography has superceded even 35mm film in the last decade. And it's a fraction of the price. Film stock and processing always WAS astronomically expensive - including 16mm (I dreamed of owning a Bolex - even a clockwork one). Even Super 8 amateur film stock was (in today's money) something like $15-20 a minute projected at 24fps*

As other posters have alluded, film's redeeming feature was always image quality and nuance - but analogue and then digital video formats won out on cost (although even professional video formats 30 years ago were markedly inferior to film). Film really does now have only 'authenticity' going for it (only a handfull of still photographers using large format tend to continue to argue for discernable properties in process film image quality). Yes. You can simulate it.

Let's look at it the other way around: It's a real shame nobody was crazy enough to shoot early WAM movies on 16mm as, if well shot, they would still stand up today.

*35mm. Back in the day, union protectionism among film technicians meant that getting involved in any kind of film production in this format and its peripheral services meant you had to hire a full crew - so anything other than a funded professional project priced out anyone but the most eccentric millionaire.

If only! Sadly I doubt it would have been affordable, it was the advent of the affordable semi-pro video camera that enabled niche fetish productions as moving images in the first place. I used to chat on-line to Rob Blaine back in the 90s, I remember when he first made the switch to a computer-based editing system, which was a very major investment at the time, and after he'd edited his first full-length video on it commenting that he was putting off deleting the digitised footage, but would have to do so to clear space to edit the next one. About the same time a 500MB hard disk would cost $$$$, and all digitized video had to be stored in full raw form - no compression, MP4 was yet to be invented - so the raw masters took up gigabytes == thousands of dollars worth of disk space. He shot on Hi8 cameras, professional ones, which I gather were in the order of $10k each. What would the equivalent 16mm film cameras have cost, plus the processing of the footage?


Interesting, didn't know that.

16mm film shooting was too expensive to use in small budget project. So it's no wonder that any wam producers have not used it.

Has anybody ever shot wam scenes on 8mm film (not 8mm video) for sale or private use?

First Japanese messy video was shot on video camera in 1990s.
To my knowledge, there is no wam sales videos shot on 8mm film in Japan (of course nobody used 16mm/35mm as well).
Perhaps there may have been private films, but I have not found or seen them yet.

I was the "cinematographer" for 8 and 16mm student productions in school about 40 years ago. I even had a vintage clockwork Bell and Howell for a while so I'm very into the "romance" of working with it but there's just no reason at all any more. The cost is prohibitive and gone are the days when the local lab could get b/w or Ektachrome back to you with relative speed. Messyhot has a great analogy going there but aside from old farts like us there's nobody who would get it. It's almost like using calligraphy to hand-write a Bible now.

Interesting. I'll bet someone, somewhere did, maybe on standard or Super 8; amateur stuff back in the '60s and '70s. Unless they invested in sets of dupes to sell as 'package movies' (the quality of which would be further degraded by doing so). And to sell to whom? They were the only person in the world with that fetish () there's no reason why it would ever see the light of day.

Hey if 16mm is good enough for The Walking Dead, it should be good enough for us!

I own an 8mm fetish film from Roxbury Press named Mud Fight. It was shot on film (probably 16mm) for the adult film collector of the 70s.

https://adultloopdb.nl/roxbury-press-film-no-633-mud-fight/

That's exactly what I was imagining!

I still shoot 16mm on occasion and always wanted to shoot a retro wam film with someone just to try to get it to look "real". The northeast US isn't exactly the WAM capital of the world, though, so finding a retro fashioned model isn't exactly easy.