Before VHS, before Betamax, before Laser Disc … there was SUPER 8!
We eagerly await the publishing of a new book called “Bootlace Cinema — The History and Lost Art Of The Package Movie”. Described by author Mark Williams as “the first book to document the history and dynamic graphic art used to market both US and European Super 8mm package movies.”
Mark has worked as a Film Projectionist for CIC and Paramount and also directed two cult indie documentary movies “VHS Forever? Psychotronic People” (2014) and its 2019 sequel “VHS Forever? Once Upon A Time In Camden”. He has also written, directed and produced a six part web series on the UK 1970’s Punk music scene called “Smash It Up The Series” which will be released eventually as an expanded feature film. He still has a “modest” film collection at home and can often be seen at Film Collector’s Events in and around London.
We often make technical changes to the site. Most things are small subtle changes that most people do not notice. Some even not noticeable for others than the admins. Other times we make bigger changes that are easily spotted. This weekend we made a change that I guess is somewhere in between.
The scrolling of the films on the front page has bothered me since we launched. The scroll bar has been visible, and you actually had to scroll using the scroll bar. To make it worse, you could scroll to a position where the cover to the far left was just partly shown. On top of that, there was an issue with scrolling in Firefox that meant you could never really scroll all the way back. You always ended up in the middle of the first cover. Now finally, after three months in the public, the scrolling has been addressed.
The new scrolling
When now you go to the front page, the page of a tag or the page of a distributor, you will no longer see a scroll bar. If you on a computer move the pointer to a row of you will see an arrow on the far right. If you click on this, the row will scroll one length, and it will align perfectly on the first cover. An arrow for scrolling the other way will show up as soon as it is possible to scroll that way. This scrolling pattern follows the design of most larger web sites, and finally we have a sane design for this too 🙂 There is an unresolved issue with scrolling for mobile phones, though, as it is common to always make sure you show a small piece of the next tile to give a hint that there is more to see. On many phones now, you will see two covers, and you get no hint that there is more and possible to scroll which is not a good design. I will look into that as soon as I can.
Changes like this might look small, and maybe they are for professional front end programmers. But for me, being a back end programmer, it took several hours making a change like this. In the end, however, I think it will make the site better, and it is worth taking small breaks from adding films and covers to do improvements like that.
I hope you like the new scrolling as much as I do 🙂
Here are some of the S8DB happenings for the second month of operation:
Over 1,000 more films have been added…we are now up to over 3,500.
Many hundreds of cover images have been submitted by film collectors including (in alphabetical order): Mats Abelli, Robert Crewdson, Martin Dew, Lennart Leverström, Tony Lewis, Bill Phelps, Tom Photiou, Graham Ritchie, Joe Taffis…..and several others! We also have got permission from several people on Facebook to use their posted scans. If we have missed anyone, we will be sure to add you here as well — many thanks!
We are performing minor image enhancements to some of these covers to clean them up a bit, so we do have a backlog of images that have yet to be posted to the site. But rest assured we are working through these as we are able. Please keep those cover images coming our way, they are great to see!
Visitors from a total of 43 different countries have used the site in the first two months.
Front page enhancements have been made which include a new listing of films by year of release. This will update each day and is set to showcase all of the years from 1929 to 1980 — another year each day will be shown on the front page.
We present one year each day on the front page
Lots of helpful feedback on errors, clarifications and additional details on distributors and films have been provided by many other collectors.
A new enhancement includes: Updates to the front page every day: We now have automatic changing (from a defined set of rules) of which categories/tags are displayed on the front page to provide a fresh look each and every day.
Search capability has been expanded to allow you to enter a specific year or year range to further refine the results you see. For example, if you want to see Drama titles, but only those from 1940 to 1953, you can do so! Or if you want to see all of 1950’s Sci-Fi, you can do this too! Watch the video below for a demonstration
The new filter function for year
There have been a lot of great ideas shared our way, and these suggestions will be looked at and prioritized to work on. Some of these are more complicated to implement than others, which just means they are added to the ‘To Do’ list and will hopefully be done a bit down the road. Any and all ideas are welcome…
To access the site, you can also just type in ‘s8db.com‘…..a little shorter and quicker!
Lastly, while we won’t always provide an S8DB update each month, we sure will whenever there is something new to share.
It is great to see so many film enthusiasts helping to make this community project better each day. Many thanks for the support you have provided so far. Feedback and suggestions can be provided via: feedback@super8database.com.
One month has passed since we launched. It has been very exciting to receive feedback and comments, and see people using the site. We have made a video where we talk about the last month.
Welcome to our new website. It is a big day for me as I can finally tell the world about my secret project for the last 18 months. With the great help of good friends, we have now finally launched the site.
