Every year, the Straight 8 competition draws submissions from filmmakers around the world, posing a deceptively simple challenge: to make a great film on just a single roll of Super 8 millimeter film — which equates to about three minutes of run time. The only editing permitted is the starting and stopping of the camera, and to ensure fairness, applicants send off their raw roll of film and a separately recorded soundtrack to the judges, who develop the film and combine it with the audio based on the start time.
Out of roughly 150 annual submissions the judges select 25 to be screened at the British Film Institute in London, and of those the top eight have their debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Among this year’s chosen few was “Just Thinking of You,” an entry by the East Hampton native Tom Van Scoyoc.
“It was almost like a callback to how I started making movies,” said Mr. Van Scoyoc. Growing up, he and his sister used to film short videos on a small camcorder she had gotten for her birthday. “We didn’t have a computer so we were kind of editing in camera, and it was just a lot of fun.” He rediscovered that feeling in a video class at East Hampton High School, which inspired him to apply to film school at the State University at Purchase, where he enrolled in 2012.
The school had a requirement that freshmen shoot all of their first-year projects on 16 millimeter film, and Mr. Van Scoyoc “absolutely fell in love” with the medium. “You have to have a lot more conviction with what you do behind the camera,” he said, with his choices limited by the expense of the physical film itself. He continued to shoot on film for the duration of the program — even after professors urged him to stop, warning that the industry had largely embraced digital technology, and that he would have trouble finding jobs.
As it happened, he “pretty much found the opposite to be true.” His graduation coincided with a boom of renewed interest in film, following the success of independent films like “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and the advocacy efforts of Hollywood directors like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson. He quickly found work on professional film sets, first loading film and then as a focus puller, and has now been working as a camera assistant for about 10 years while continuing to write and direct his own projects on the side.
Mr. Van Scoyoc learned about the Straight 8 competition last year when he filled in at the last minute as cinematographer on a friend’s submission. Her film placed in the top 25, and he was “blown away” by the experience of watching it for the first time at the London screening — on the largest screen in the United Kingdom, at one of the most iconic cinemas in Europe. He decided then that he would make his own film the following year.
Shooting took place over a week this past February. “There was something a little bit masochistic about it in the sense that I went beyond what the rules asked me to do,” he said. He stayed away from digital technology in the planning process, too, eschewing his computer and phone, writing out each draft of the film’s voiceover by hand, and sketching out every frame on his storyboard. “With all the tools that film gives you, you can really tell a story in any amount of time — if you are able to really dig deep and get to the core of the message.”
He spent one day filming with a three-person crew, and then the rest of the week “basically living out of a backpack,” traveling from one location to another, waiting for it to get light or dark out — whatever it took to capture, in chronological order, the shots he had mapped out. He enlisted the composer Adam Woodley, a close friend and frequent collaborator, to create the soundtrack and, after weeks of meticulous planning and execution, they sent off the single roll of film and a three-minute audio file to the Straight 8 judges.
On May 1 he learned that their film had been selected as part of the top eight. It screened in Cannes on May 19, and then in London with the top 25 the week after. “I’ve wanted to go to Cannes since I was a kid, so to be there for a film as my first time — the 11-year-old kid inside me was freaking out the whole time.” The screening went by so quickly he was barely able to take it all in, but he recognized that he had accomplished what he set out to do.
“One of the things that I love about Straight 8 is that, more than anything, they’re looking for a good film,” he said. “There’s so much politics that goes into most film festivals, but with this one it really feels like if you work hard and do a good job and tell a story that is compelling, you have a pretty good chance.”
Though future submission fees are waived for the eight finalists, Mr. Van Scoyoc does not have plans right now to enter next year’s competition, realizing that it would be difficult to top this year’s experience. At the moment he is working on two scripts, continuing to move toward a long-held goal of making feature-length films. “But who knows? Maybe I’ll change my mind.”
