In Dog Years

We love a success story here at onsuper8.org, and we love them even more if it's about Super 8 making it big.

For those that don't know, Dog Years is the genius, bitter sweet story of Ben, a 39 year old castrated mongrel who fills us in on his life to date as his owner takes him for a run out on the beach.

Shot on Super 8, Dog Years picked up 2 major awards at the 10th Brief Encounters Film Festival back in 2004 and has since toured the world, playing before feature films on 35mm at The Curzon Soho in London, and The Watershed Bristol, as well as featuring at festivals as far as New York, Los Angeles.

The first episode, now dubbed "Love", is part of what is now a series of films and was shot with a single cartridge of Super 8 stock, with all edits done in camera on location.

For the second episode, "Health", which is premiering this week at the Aspen Shorts Fest 2006, the Dog Years team have upped their production values.

Director Sam Hearn told us that "Health" was shot on Ektachrome 64T with a more generous seven cartridges used for the shoot, a Canon Auto Zoom 814 being their weapon of choice. After location work was wrapped, telecine transfers to DV were undertaken at Kahl Film in Germany, before final editing and colour grading using the Apple Final Cut Pro suite.

If "Health" is half as inspired as "Love" it'll be a real treat, and Sam and fellow director/writer Richard Penfold have more than proven that with a solid idea and dedication to a vision, the most modest of Super 8 productions can make it big.

We love the warmth and humour in Dog Years and urge all our readers to burn some bandwidth catching up on Ben, his unique perspective on life, and his beautiful northern accent!

Both episodes 1 and 2 are now available to buy on DVD from the Dog Years site and the second episode will be available for download before the month is out.

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