Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

The full potentialities of 8mm sound film will not come to fruition, however, until a wholly new 8mm system is perfected. This must offer the public: a. Quality, low cost projectors. b. Quality, inexpensive release prints. c. Quality, low cost methods of making reduction prints. d. Quality, low cost methods of original production in 8mm for informal subjects, with satisfactory duplicates, in moderate numbers, obtainable. e. New print marketing and distribution setups. At the present time, it is estimated that there are approximately 4,600,000 amateur cine cameras in use in the U.S. and about 3,700,000 silent-8 projectors. Any appreciable penetration of the amateur cine market with 8mm sound projectors would seem to call for a machine that will permit the amateur to add sound to his personally-made movies. The complexities of optical sound recording are such that most industry leaders doubt whether the average amateur would be able to cope with the technical problems of recording sound through traditional, optical photographic methods. It has been suggested that while magnetic projectors would satisfy the home market, 8mm optical units would be perferable for educational, industrial and other institutional uses. This is the point at which the manufacturer is faced with a major policy decision as to the type of machine he will espouse. Even though it is more difficult to make a high quality 8mm sound projector than its 16mm counterpart, the public— because of the heretofore lower cost of the home 8mm film medium— has come to expect that 8mm machines will be priced considerably less than 16mm equipment. It has been said that until an American manufacturer can turn out upwards of 250,000 units per year of a single piece of apparatus as complicated as a sound projector, it does not pay him to automate the manufacturing process, and he cannot avail himself of those economies that only derive from mass production. It would seem, therefore, that the manufacturing of 8mm sound projectors must be conducted on a scale comparable to that which now prevails in the case of silent units if the ultimate economies are to be achieved. As a corollary to mass production, however, there is the matter of mass sales. It is at this point that it woidd appear logical to emphasize a type of macliine which will have universal application in the amateur as well as the professional phases of the nontheatrical film field. It is obvious that the rate of institutional purchases of 8mm sound projectors will depend, to a very considerable extent, upon the availability of professionally-produced films in the 8mm width. This "chicken-or-the-egg" dilemma is accentuated b>' the fact that many producers of professional motion pictures are reluctant at this point to enter the 8mm field. They hesitate to invest in 8mm pre-print materials, an inventory of 8mm preview and release prints and— even more important— a whole new marketing approach until there are enough 8mm sound projectors out in the field to provide a readymade market. It is becoming apparent that those of us who would engage in exploring the potentialities of 8mm sound film must set our sights high. We must be willing to accept new concepts as far as the magnitude of the market is concerned. Anything less is doomed to failure. Eight millimeter sound-film has no real merit unless a way can be found to deliver onto the screen a moving image in color, with ccmcomitant sound that is not too inferior to that which up until now has been delivered by the average 16mm sound projector. Furthermore, laoth the laboratory cost of release prints and the ultimate retail sales price must be drastically less than is now the case with traditional 16inm prints. If 8mm sound-film develops into the mass medium that its proponents predict, it will be necessary to think in terms of 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, and even 100,000 release prints of a single production. An entirely new marketing pattern will have been created to produce sales of this magnitude. Already some distributors are exploring the economic and merchandising problems that are involved in creating thousands of fresh sales outlets for the new, narrowgauge, low-priced prints. In addition to camera stores, supermarkets, phonograph-record shops, dnigstores, sporting goods houses, department stores, and aggressive direct mail campaigns are being contemplated as some of the ways of achieving volume print sales on a scale almost comparable to the paperback book publishing field— where a minimum run of 250,000 copies is the usual practice. X his then, is the broad outline of what that very perceptive sociologist labeled "another milestone in the communications revolution." It is apparent that man has not only entered upon a Space Age; he has also embarked upon an era in which the motion picture will grow to stupendous proportions. Film and the moving image are well on the way to overtaking the printed word as man's most popular form of recorded information. Teachers clamor for a system which will allow youngsters to check out film prints from the school library and run them at home in preparation for the next day's classes. Great refinements in projector threading, reliability and screen-brilliance are demanded daily. Church groups seek some satisfactory answer to movies sufficiently economical to be used in graded Sunday schools. Doctors and scientists are becoming excited (as witness the recent fonnation of the American Science Film Association ) about the motion picture as an everyday tool to use with the slide rule and the computer in their research activities. Already, educators are pointing out that today's educated citizen must be filmically literate too. Our children will discover that the mark of an Educated Man is not only the handling of his native language with finesse in both written and spoken form, but the expressing of himself in the international language of the film and of the moving image. Techniques of film presentation will therefore assiune even greater importance. Educational Screen and Audiovisual Guide — July, 1961 335