Aaton A-Minima

Type: Super 16mm · Motion Picture

This project was shot on S16mm with Sena for her upcoming show. It became three pieces: Collage first, then Cube and Mirrors.

Camera & Lenses

Aaton A-Minima with Zeiss Super Speed MK III prime lenses, rented from a film shop near me.

The spools were the hard part. The A-Minima takes its own 200ft daylight spools, so I bought 400ft rolls and had them respooled onto the Minima spools I own. The same shop did that respooling for free, which is the only reason the whole thing was practical.

Filmstock

I used different film stocks depending on the context of each piece.
For the 200ft Collage, I used Kodak 500T Vision2.
For the 200ft Cube and Mirrors, I mixed Kodak 200T Vision2 with Kodak 50D Vision3.

I particularly enjoyed using the 50D (daylight) film stock for its grain characteristics and colors.

After processing and 3K scanning I did the grain work. It was not about removing grain. I changed the tone of how much grain was present and refined it from there, and not with the usual post processing: I used the kind of archival process that film restoration places work with. I had a couple of plugins from that world and ran them on a local machine, and the results came out well.