Awesome Film

Love the grainy look of real 35mm film? It turns out you can still get compact film cameras from Ilford. The reusable Sprite 35-II Film Camera has a fixed-focus 31mm f/9 wide-angle lens and fixed 1/120s shutter speed, providing boundaries to challenge your creativity. It comes in silver/black, black/black, and silver/red versions and has a built-in flash.

If you were around in the 1970s, you might recall those compact cameras that used 110 film cartridges. Maker Wesley Treat shows us how he made a coffee table based on the popular (but grainy) film format. He built the super-size Kodacolor cartridge from wood using kerf bending techniques to make the curved sides. Also, his wooden Gonk Droid is awesome.

Film fanatic Denis-Carl Robidoux is on a mission to preserve as many old movie trailers as he can. So he built a machine he calls the Gugusse Roller that plays 8mm, 16mm, or 35mm film reels and captures each frame digitally. Thus far, he’s digitized more than 500 trailers from movies dating from the 1960s to the early 2000s.

Most content is shot digitally these days, but there’s something special about the look of movies shot on film. Gav of The Slow Mo Guys shows us the insides of a vintage 16mm camera for an up-close look at how it works as the film rolls past its shutter. It’s amazing how those sprockets keep each frame perfectly exposed.

The perfect side table for any home theater is made using vintage Goldberg Brothers 35mm film reels. Its center pedestal is made from poly plastic, painted to match the reels in silver, gold, or bronze, and the 20″ glass top provides a smooth surface. Stands 24″ tall, and requires some basic assembly.

It may be hard to believe, but Calvin Frederick created the hypnotic visuals of Bermuda without compositing or VFX. He used a motion-control rig, mirrors, an LCD panel, and a grid of LEDs.

Director Benjamin Bardou used CGI from Grand Theft Auto IV to put together the drifting digital dreamscape that is Do Computers Dream of Electronic Sheep? Watch and let your mind wander.

Davy and Kristin McGuire’s The Ice Book is a miniature theatre performance that blends animation, puppetry, and film to bring a pop-up book vividly to life in front of a live audience.

Michael arrives in Berlin to visit Gabi, only to discover that a terrible virus is spreading across the city at a rapid pace and turning people into mindless homicidal maniacs, in Rammbock.

Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel may have had several false-starts as a studio motion picture, but this fan-made Rama film by Philip Mahoney and Aaron Ross will tide us over for now.

Vision Research’s high-speed digital camera, the Phantom Flex, features a 4K 2560×1600 CMOS sensor with 12bit color depth. At max resolution the camera can capture up to 1,560 frames/second.

Here’s your chance to appear in and meet the cast of the next X-Men movie. A non-speaking, walk-on role is being auctioned off, with proceeds going to the Worldwide Orphans Foundation.