I started shooting Super 8 because I was curious. I kept shooting it because it changed what I was able to make.
What Super 8 is
Super 8 is a physical film format — a cartridge of real Kodak stock, manufactured today, that you load into a camera the size of a large paperback book. You shoot. You can’t play it back. You can’t check the exposure. When the cartridge is done, you mail it to a lab, and three to four weeks later you receive digital scans of the footage you made.
That’s it. No instant feedback, no safety net. What you committed to on the day is what comes back from the lab.
This constraint is not a limitation I work around. It is the point.
What it looks like
The grain in Super 8 footage is visible. Not as noise — as texture. There’s a difference. Digital noise is random and feels like a failure; film grain has a structure to it, a rhythm, and your eye reads it as something intentional. The warmth of Kodak Vision3 stock is real warmth, not a colour grade applied after the fact. The dynamic range compresses in a way that softens highlights and deepens shadows simultaneously.
What this adds up to — and I’ve spent time trying to articulate why it works, not just that it does — is that viewers read film as memory. Not because of nostalgia for the format, but because of the texture. Memory doesn’t have perfect resolution. Memory has grain. When Super 8 footage cuts into a digital film, something in the viewer’s brain changes register slightly, and that register is the one where important things are stored.
What it adds to a wedding film
The Super 8 footage I shoot typically runs 15–30 seconds at a stretch throughout the film. It is not primary coverage. It is texture — a layer that runs against the clinical perfection of the digital footage and makes the edit feel more human.
It works best during quiet moments. The dress on the hanger in morning light. A first look, before the couple has said anything. A grandmother’s hands folding and unfolding in her lap. The empty reception hall in the twenty minutes before guests arrive. These are the moments where the grain and warmth of film do the most work — not the big emotional peaks, but the pauses between them. The moments that will feel the most like memory when you watch the film ten years from now.
What it requires from you
Super 8 works beautifully with natural light — window light in the morning, outdoor ceremonies, the warm glow of a reception room in the early evening. Kodak’s Vision3 500T is a fast stock designed for a wide range of conditions, and I choose the moments I commit to film with care: the getting-ready room with good window light, a first look in the open air, the quiet of a ceremony space before guests arrive. These are the settings where the grain and warmth of the format do their most beautiful work.
Because I’m shooting without the ability to check the footage in the moment, I choose each frame deliberately. There’s a quality to that kind of attention — the unhurried selection of a moment before raising the camera — that carries into the footage when it comes back from the lab. It is a different way of working, and it produces something that feels genuinely different from anything else in a wedding film.
The development process
After the wedding, I mail the cartridges to a professional film lab for ECN-2 processing and scanning. Kodak Vision3 500T requires ECN-2 chemistry, and there are dedicated Super 8 labs in North America that handle this well. Turnaround from mailing to receiving digital scans is typically three to four weeks. The scans arrive as digital files that I then cut into the editing workflow alongside the digital footage.
The integration is seamless in the edit. The viewer doesn’t need to know which moments are film and which are digital. The two formats coexist in the timeline and the difference between them becomes a compositional tool — I can use the register shift intentionally, cutting to Super 8 when the film needs to slow down and breathe.
The question I get most often is: can you actually see it in the final film? Yes. Not always in an obvious way. Not in a way that announces itself. But it’s there — in the grain, in the warmth, in the way certain moments feel held rather than captured. That quality of being held is the thing I’ve never been able to fully replicate in digital, no matter how careful the lighting or how considered the edit. Film has it by nature. That’s why I keep shooting it.