OKTO35 3D-Printed Analog Film Movie Camera

Anyway, some years ago I went to a Lumière brothers exhibition. At the end of the exhibition there was an original "Cinematograph" in function.

I was astonished by the simplicity of the machine: It was just a little wooden box with a film magazine, a lens and a hand crank.[1][2]

And it doubled as a projector, just by placing a lamp behind it[3] (an oil lamp, and film was highly flammable back then, most early motion pictures were lost due to fire).

And that was it, it required neither electricity, nor any special or complex operation. I couldn't stop thinking how this little device was the start of one of the most important and influential industries of the 20th century.

I guess most of the innovation was in the development of the film itself.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Institut...

[2]: https://img.theculturetrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/10...

[3]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Cinemato...

This project is very cool because not only does it leverage pre-made film, but also that often overlooked marvel the pre-made electric motor is in there too.

The electric motor was such a marvel when it was first available commercially that you would buy one separately and then gather together a smorgasbord of different machines which you could use with your motor. If you told these people at the time that motors would become ubiquitous to the extent that individual devices would have their own, permanently attached, dedicated motors they would have been astonished.

Finally, if you don’t have access to a 3D printer but want to build your own camera, the classic example is the 24mm frame matchbox pinhole — little more than two film cans with an exposure chamber in between.

http://www.matchboxpinhole.com/winder.html

The camera also works as a film scanner. This is brilliant because almost always you want to edit in digital.

The camera’s mechanical jitter could be stabilized in post, so it doesn’t seem like an enormous problem to me.

Impressive project!

It shoots 4 pictures on the 35mm film width. Which gives it similar specs to 8mm cameras. Constraint is : you can only film 300 frames at a time (a few seconds). But it makes the camera even more fun and unique.

I'm a big fan of projects like this as it makes it very cheap to experiment with weird/exotic film stocks. This design is so advanced that you could shoot a 10 minute short film for a couple hundred $.

Overall amazing. I'd really like to see it with something closer to 16mm. I'm not sure how cheap or expensive that it would be but I'd be curious, that might be more usable in a practical situation.

Overall great stuff though!

The cost comparison doesn't feel perfectly genuine, because it considers development _and scanning_ of 8mm has to be done in a laboratory while it can be done at home for 35mm.

Regarding scanning, the author spent an inordinate amount of time building this amazing device than can scan as well as shoot; but he obviously could have built instead a machine to scan 8mm film. Even without it, it's fairly easy to transform 8mm film into digital at home; there are many tools to do this.

Regarding film development, I'm not familiar with 8mm specific requirements, but if the author is able to develop color 35mm film, which is not that easy in my experience, he should be more than able to develop at least B&W 8mm film?

Not to belittle this incredible project though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nh9BTMWj9M

Obviously rather expensive to do it this way, but shows how much image quality you can squeeze out of that 5.8 x 4 mm image frame

Is the creator reading this?

Personally, what would attract me more to a mkIII of this camera would be:

1. scan with smartphone;

2. lowering usage costs / efficiency of film use;

3. further compactness;

- Would you also like some systems engineering thoughts?