First steps

Many many moons ago, when I were a lad, I had a go at doing special effects on my trusty, but crap, Super-8 cine camera. I had a go at animating some plasticine dinosaurs and a Morph-like man. Because the camera had no single-frame setting, I hit the button to get as few frames as possible. The results were bloody awful... I never had another go.

But, I did end up adapting the camera to run at high-speed, by replacing the motor and main drive gear. I managed to get it up to 200 frames-per-second (fps), over ten times silent 8-mm movie speed. Given my abiding fascination with things that go bang!, I built a little model building from balsa wood, cut it up, dressed the inside with wrecked floors and debris, planted a tiny blackpowder charge in it, and blew it up... Twice.

These are the results (transferred from Super-8 to VHS many years ago, then from VHS to DVD, and finally to YouTubeness):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4gp3hyqsY