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I began making amateur Super 8 movies while a sophomore at Ward Melville High School
in East Setauket, Long Island. After pedalling my bicycle along my N.Y. Daily News route, I had enough money to purchase a
GAF Ansco movie camera for $20. I also bought a Bell & Howell Super 8 projector for a whopping $63 along with a blinding
flood lamp and a roll of Kodachrome film. I shot my first cartridge that night, January 3, 1970.
The Ansco didn't last long (it took a fatal plunge from an improperly strapped camera
case) and was replaced with a Lafayette Electronics Super-8 camera with a 3 to 1 zoom lens. This camera would carry me through
my high school film experiments that would lay the groundwork for the STAR TRIX films.
Starting out in film, I mimicked things I liked. One strong influence was the MY FAVORITE
MARTIAN TV series that was running in syndication at the time. I enlisted my younger brother Tom to play a Martian and his
look-alike earth friend. Being unable to do a split screen effect with the Super-8 cartridge, I contrived to show both characters
using quick cuts and quick clothes changes. When my youngest brother Larry got tall enough, he was used as a stand-in and
photographed from the back with Tom facing him from the front.
From late 1970 to April 1972, I cranked out 24 four or five minute short episodes for
this series. All were shot silent but fortunately Tom's facility for pantomime made the "stories" somewhat coherent. Actually,
they weren't so much stories as they were a few sentences scribbled on a piece of loose leaf paper. They were mainly a hook
on which to hang an experiment of some kind. For example, wanting to try a very fine thread for levitation effects to
see if we can avoid having it photograph.
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| My second camera |
Unlike the MY FAVORITE MARTIAN series, I filmed a final episode where the alien kid
returns to Mars. He flies to Cape Kennedy in his spaceship and docks with an Apollo moonrocket just before it lifts off. In
1971, Eastman Kodak introduced it's XL (Existing Light) movie cameras with high speed Ektachrome 160 film. It was designed
to shoot under low light conditions, reducing the need for the glaring floodlamps. Trying a role of Ektachrome in my Lafayette
camera, I photographed movies off the screen, hoping to be able to combine several projected images together. This was a crude
form of optical printer.
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| Spaceship movie and slide composite |
Utilizing a slide projector with images of earth from space and the Saturn 5 rocket, I combined
footage of the spaceship model shot against a black velvet background and photgraphed the composite image with Ektachrome
160. It worked well except for a slight strobing due to the camera and projector speeds not matching exactly. This
arrangement would be modified over the years to allow me to shoot spaceships, star fields, planets and other effects for Super-8
films. It wasn't until I went into the service that I found out this can't be done. As Uncle Martin would say "Sometimes ignorance
is an ally".
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