Super-8 is
Many of the 35mm stocks are now available for S8, letting you get an excellent picture. (Assuming you have a camera with a rock-steady gate... which many S8's don't have, giving it that wobbly look).
On the flipside, those newer stocks don't really look "older". The K40 (Kodachrome) stock for S8 has been discontinued... that was one which sure had a distinctive period look to it.
i heard that 8mm films can be done on literally nothing, its just a matter of buying enough film
Well... "literally nothing" is probably not the best way to put it.
Let's say you want to make a 10-minute movie. (using K40 for rough numbers)
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For $11 (roughly) you get a 50' cartridge of film, that last 2.5 minutes.
That makes $44 for ten minutes of raw footage. That's also assuming every single frame is used perfectly. (Which never happens). Say hello to shooting ratios.
Need to do a few takes over? Actors flub a line, or otherwise mess up? Boom-mic appears in frame a split second ruining an otherwise perfect take? Time to use more film. A ratio of 3:1 seems to be a fairly optimistic number (I've read here on the boards that 6:1 is more likely)... but we'll assume we kick ass at film... so we only get three times as much raw stock as the total length.
That makes $132 for our raw filmstock so far. 30 minutes of stock for our 10 minute film. 3:1
Cool beans! Time to shoot... day goes well and we get all our shots in. It's a wrap. Now to get the film developed.
Off to Dwayne's it goes... For the average Joe (unlike HTTK) it's $9 to develop each cartridge. Our twelve cartridges will run $108 to develop.
The running total (for the raw stock and developing) is now $240
We get our film back from Dwayne's... huzzah! It looks fantastic. Now to edit it.
Time to ship the developed film off to a lab to have it telecined to video, so we can edit it on the computer.
We'll use Yale Film & Video (not the cheapest, but I like 'em) to do the telecine. They run $250/hour for 'cining Super-8, with a half-hour minimum of $125. Ack, you might say. Luckily you only have 30 minutes of developed footage to run... you can live with $125, right?
Well... not quite that simple. The 'cine doesn't run in realtime (more like 3:1) so that 30 minutes of footage will take 90 minutes to run through the 'cine. That's a good $375 for a beautiful transfer.
Running total now is... $615
Excellent! We get our footage back on a mini-DV tape, load it into the camcorder and suck it into the computer to edit. A short time later we have finally finished our 10-minute film.
10-minute
silent film
Add in whatever costs you like for arranging to record sound/dialogue to match the footage.
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Compared to shooting on a mini-DV camera, with an investment of a single (and reuseable) $10 mini-DV tape... one option is certainly more viable than the other. My costs may be a bit on the high-end... it's a ballpark, though.
However, the S8 film version will still look a tonne better!
Maybe start off with a digital camera to get the knack of various aspects of filmmaking (for very little cost), then move to film when budget allows?
Film is awesome.