a tiny antique film camera

A few weeks back I went to the camera show in Grapevine looking for both camera equipment and anything interesting sounding. While I largely passed on the stuff that I'd actually want to shoot footage with, I did find this little treasure to record - and at a bargain price of $20!

What you're looking at there is a B and H Filmo Sportster 8mm film camera. It has a manual crank, a thick metal casing, an a million little noises to record.

While I did manage to get tons of coverage while recording it today, I'd like to focus on one specific usage that I get tons of mileage out of these kinds of things for: UI and small servos.

Now this particular device doesn't have any electronic parts, but it still made tons of very clean servo sounding noises regardless - especially since I was able to drag the switch you hold down to make the film spin and get a cool scraping noise. When highpassed, and pitched around it can be pretty convincing, while remaining very natural and organic sounding.

In this sample the first half is as recorded and the second half is severely highpassed. I tend to use these types of noises with a little flange for sci fi servos and UI sounds pretty frequently.



The mp3 compression on soundcloud doesn't handle pure high end all that well, but you get the idea.

The other thing this camera had loads of was mechanical latch and click sounds. In many ways it sounded like gun foley, but I can also use this kind of thing for high tech sounding buttons and clicks with the same highpass technique.

Its a little ironic that I'm dreaming up all of these high tech sounds given the source, but in the end no one cares what the thing looked like when you recorded it.

Here's a little demo of the clicks and latches using the same superhighpass filter and with the same soundcloud limitations.



All in all it was well worth the purchase, especially when you add in future foley possibilities with weapons and other mechanical devices.