“I’m grateful I came up in the Super 8 era. Splicing film and doing everything you had to do. It’s a precious resource. If you’re doing sound, you get your two and a half minutes. It’s all important. It’s costing you money. You got to have a plan. It’s film—you got to know your shit.”
— Richard Linklater
“We were just documenting ourselves and each other with Super 8, doing what we do everyday—giving each other piercings, shaving our heads, eating dog food out of bowls, lol. It was pre-internet and pre-digital, so we were well ahead of the curve in terms of this kind of self-documentation.”
— Bruce LaBruce
“It led us into a confrontation with the sensibility of the day. They weren’t ready to accept queer people. So we got into our little movement, queercore. The Super 8 films were a part of that because I wanted to make sure that people were able to create things, whether it was a band, or a fanzine, or films—that it was easy for them to do and not financially impossible. Super 8 was something I was promoting as a vehicle to create your own film, to be able to show them to people, and create your own culture.”
— G.B. Jones
“My goal was to make films as simply, cheaply, and quickly as possible. In other words, in-camera editing, no sound, one cartridge, three minutes, do everything yourself—the acting, the editing, the projecting. So you can make a film in half a day and show it as soon as it gets back from the lab. That’s always been my philosophy. $50 film budgets.”
— John Porter