Type of Media: Video
Completed: October 2010
Created by: Stephen Richards (editing and retouching of video and photographs, editing of music)
Camera Operators and Photographers: Unknown
These Super 8 video clips were recorded during our school’s tenth anniversary celebrations in November 1980. It is the only video footage we have from the school’s first thirty years. If you know who recorded the video, please let me know so that I can properly acknowledge, their work. The type of Super 8 film used for these recordings cannot record sound. All sounds and music were added in the editing process.
I hope you enjoy the journey back in time.
Photographs
The scanned photos seen during the end credits can be downloaded from our flickr page:
www.flickr.com/photos/43402751@N08/sets/72157625071330071/
Music
The following tracks were used as background music:
- Dustin O’Halloran – Opus 36
- Gackt – Returner
- Epik High – Forest
- Joe Hisaishi – Theme from Princess Mononoke
- Kostas Pavlidis – Spread Your Wings and Fly
- 楊庶正 – 祝福太平山 (performed by the Lam Woo’s Intermediate Girls Choir)
- Hon See-wah – Erhu Solo
- Michael Nyman – Peeking
- The Brilliant Green – Goodbye and Good Luck
Originally, a olot of the songs were different, but they were picked up by YouTube’s automated copyright claims function (even though a small portion from the middle of each song was used. Originally, the second track was Intensive Time by Philip Glass, the third track was The Sun Will Sine (Bali Ambient Mix) by Ohmna and the fourth track was Energy Flow by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The fifth, sixth and seventh tracks replaced a guitar instrumental by the Korean group Tearliner.
About the Editing Process
The images were edited using Premiere Pro and After Effects CS4. The photos were retouched in Photoshop CS3.
In June, I found eight small reels of developed (and very degraded) film in a paper bag, at the bottom of a big plastic container full of old photographs from the 70s and 80s. The container itself was at the bottom of a cupboard. Our TA, Cherry, helped me track down a local company that could do a telecine transfer (i.e., create digital files from film stock)—Last Coyote Productions.
Apparently, Super film should be stored in very dry, near freezing conditions (a far cry from Hong Kong’s hot and humid climate), so the film has deteriorated quite a lot in the past thirty years. Before the editing process a lot of the footage looked like videos of shadows moving around in a purple murk.
Each reel contained about two-and-a-half minutes of film. This is why the editing sometimes seems a little choppy. A lot of the shots were very short (just a few seconds), presumably because the video camera operators were trying capture long events in a few minutes of film.
Almost all the usable clips from seven of the reels are included in this video. The eighth reel features the speech day, which mainly consists of recordings of (silent) speeches and students receiving awards. I will clean that up and post it in the coming weeks.
I’m still not satisfied with the images (the colors seem washed out), but they are a lot better than they were at the beginning.
Original Film (Left) and Final Product (Right)
I did learn a lot about the different colour applications in Premiere Pro and After Effects. The following effects were used:
- Auto color
- Auto balance
- Auto levels
- Brightness and contrast
- Levels
- Color balance
- Color offset
- Level
- Gamma
- Pedestal
- Remove grain
- Luma curves
- Shadow/highlight
- Photo filter
- Color finesse (an After Effects plug-in that lets you handle a lot of the above effects at one time)
Related Videos
The first video in this series of promotional videos was School Memories: Hong Kong in the Seventies
We just did a telecine transfer of three reels to start with. The process is relatively expensive, and we didn’t know what was on them or if the footage was usable. I produced a few videos from this footage as a test:
Lam Woo Pom Poms
Lam Woo Lion Dance
Gymnastics Dance Routine
The following footage did not suit the 10th Anniversary Celebrations, so I uploaded it separately:
1980 Speech Day (Unedited footage of the school’s speech day held during the anniversary celebrations. A recent version of the school hymn being performed by the school’s mixed voice choir is used as the audio track.The film quality is not good because the lighting conditions were not suitable for shooting with that kind of camera at such a distance (the camera appears to be have been positioned on the balcony at the back of the hall). In addition, the film has deteriorated over the last thirty years and almost all colour information has been lost (the whole film had turned reddish). Basically, I just tried to make the scene visible by working with various effects relating to light (mainly luma correction).
