In early 2022 I lucked upon 9 rolls of expired Plus-X super 8 film which had been refrigerated since 2007. Knowing that Plus-X had been discontinued since 2010, I realized that I had the opportunity to potentially shot the last ever film on the format and busied myself on creating a story worthy of that honour.

I wanted to tell a personal story, something small and intimate, about family and the challenges of an son wanting to reconnect with his father.

With Lost & Found, we created a film under the harshest of conditions:

– We only had 24 minutes of film, all 15 years out of date. We timed out our shots and realized we could afford one take of every shot. As the film stock had been discontinued for over 12 years, we realized there could be no retakes or reshoots if an actor flubbed a line, the film jammed or was poorly exposed.

– Where the film was 15 years out of date, we had to gauge how the sensitivity of the film had degraded over time. This meant we had to use one of our precious rolls of film to conduct exposure tests further tightening our shooting ratio (21 mins of film for a 12 minute short).

– Super 8 doesn’t shoot exactly 24fps, but approximately 24fps. Our sound, shot externally had to be manually synced line by line as it drifted in and out of sync.

– Our main shooting location was next to a busy train line. One unexpected train and our audio would be unusable.

Lost & Found is likely the last film of it’s kind and a triumph, both narratively and technically. It is by far the film I am most proud of making, and a testament to proper pre-production.