Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/09/fantastic-car-race-footage-of.html
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Maseratis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis. . .hey! Who snuck that Dodge Superbee in there!?!?
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Nick first posted it on the Indycar subreddit and shared more info. The voiceovers were taken from original films of sports car races at Road America from 1958 and 1963. You can’t get sound Super 8 stock anymore, so he recorded the engine noise with a shotgun mic and old tape recorder. The effect is fantastic.
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The fonts for the title and the narration are icing on the film quality cake.
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They’ve really nailed the whole look and sound of the old news reels. The guy doing the voice over is spot on, and the script sounds like it was ripped from the headlines of yesteryear.
Edit @vector Ah, that explains why the narration sounds so authentic… 'cause it is 
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It’s definitely wild how the medium itself immediately makes whatever is being filmed “feel” from a specific era even though visually it’s from present day. Very cool video and love the effort that was put into the editing, the design elements and the filming.
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Yeah, Super8 was quite a thing, and cool to see someone using it today. My brother and I - in like, 1977 or 78 - made a short sci-fi movie with a Super8 camera, and we had a bb pistol we used for a blaster prop, and I actually took the film and used a felt-tip marker to add the energy bolts to each frame. It was honestly a shitty little movie, but so much fun to make.
The only problem of course was our camera didn’t record any sound. So we used old style cards, like they did in the silent film days, for dialogue.
(Quick poll, since I was ambivalent on the spelling - dialog, or dialogue? English has an effed-up orthography, but I kinda like that we preserve artifacts of word origins in the spelling even if we don’t pronounce them anymore; gh being another prime example.)
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“Enhance!”
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Thank you! The script and the sound were so spot on I was more in awe of that than anything. Still, the whole thing is terrific.
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All that’s missing is the Scottish brogue of Jackie Stewart.
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“Fifty-five starters in four price classes, up to four thousand dollars…”
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Aww. A little disappointed to hear that the script, narration and sound design were not original too. I was totally geeking out on how these modern guys had nailed the vintage narration in both timbre and content. Still, very well done.
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Super8 cam found a kindred spirit.
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I especially love it when folks do full frame 8 mm HD transfers. The film always looks fantastic! We should see it more often, there’s more gold out there!
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IMO the sound doesn’t really match the visuals. One being an amateur super-8 recording, the other a professional style news-reel from the 50s.
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I was kind of surprised that ostensibly new 8mm film stock had the same color shift and lack of saturation that the old, period films have.
According to their YouTube page, the stock used in this film were Kodak 50D and 200T, which are both current film stocks sold by Kodak. If you go to Kodak’s website and view the demos, you’ll see that both stocks produce gorgeous color with very fine grain.
It would seem that they’ve done a hell of a lot of post-production work to make these films look like what we stereotypically think old films should look like. A neat effect, to be sure. I’d love to see the raw shots before they did the post-processing, though.
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Road America is my childhood. I grew up at the races each summer and this video is fantastic. This is my family’s history, dad spent summers in Elkhart, WI as well, and I am in love. Thank you to Nick for putting this fab mashup together!
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I’m glad you enjoyed the video!
I just stumbled across this thread and made an account here
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I left the colors/saturation of the film the same as it came to me from Cinelab, the developer/digitizer.
Most professional film productions would use something like this in post production to match the colors perfectly, but I don’t own anything like that so I just left it.
Glad you enjoyed the film!
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Welcome to BoingBoing!
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