I was asked to write something about what it was like for me when I started making films. That was 48 years ago, so I’m not sure how exact my memory is.

 But I’ll try to describe something about that time. I only took one super8 workshop (at the Millennium in the East Village in Manhattan) for 3 nights. I learned the basics about using the camera (and maybe something about lighting?) and probably something about editing, which we did with a little viewer element and a set of rewinds, so it was hard to gauge how the film was running because the speed was only how fast you wound the handles, not exactly 18 or 24 frames per second.

 I started by making what I think now is a very simple film called “Hot Water”—various shots of people and water (swimming, in the snow, etc). 

I also made a soundtrack by having a friend with me play some little toy plastic instruments.
It isn’t a film I’ve ever shown since then because it was just a trial run.

 At the time, I had a boyfriend who had gotten a filmmaking degree at SUNY Buffalo, where some very important filmmakers taught (like Hollis Frampton) and he was deeply involved in experimental film ideas, which influenced me a great deal. The second film, “Scar Tissue,” was made in a way that I thought was very mathematical—how much black and clear leader to put in between the images to keep the viewer’s eyes alert, surprised, etc.
 
I enjoyed working out the math/structure but I also wanted to use that to express something social or emotional. It was the era of “structural filmmaking,” and a lot of those films were screened at the Millennium and the Collective for Living Cinema, which I attended every weekend as a way to learn about this new kind of film. But even though some ways of working with images was interesting to me, I often found that they lacked any sort of social or emotional content; they seemed to not care abot the “message” beyond a message about structure, and I was already very keen on making films with “stories” even if I was very experimental/non-conventional in how I told the stories.
 
It was also silent. I thought my understanding of sound with films wasn’t good yet and it seemed like enough of a job to figure out the visual element.

 The next was “Cool Hands, Warm Heart,” and because I was also very interested in narrative films, I decided to try something with actors performing in a public space. Again, I didn’t have much training, didn’t know much about how things were done, so I ended up being the entire crew—dealing with huge crowds of real people watching as the actors did their scenes on the stage, etc. It was extremely difficult; I recommend having a few other people around to help! But also when you see the film—it’s very high contrast, which now looks to me like a problem. I would prefer that it’s not quite so high contrast but I was learning as I did things, learning about film stocks and lighting, and I maybe didn’t know enough at that point to be able to control the technology very well. It could also be because I shot it in super8 and then blew it up on the optical printer to 16mm (because it was getting more difficult to have places to show that had a super8 projector) so the settings in the optical printer might have added to the contrast issue.

 The last one in your program is “Gently Down the Stream,” which was made after I’d cut my teeth for a few years in making the others, so I had at least some experience with the technology. But I was also very poor, and 16mm film was expensive, so I decided to use some of the footage I’d shot for “Hot Water”—the swimmer, for example. That’s something I’ve done in other films—used outtakes from prior films when the images work for what I’m doing later. And the one great example of of a lesson I learned is that I made a big mistake with the optical printer when I was blowing up the super8 footage—instead of filling the frame, the images were small in the center surrounded by black! I freaked out, I couldn’t afford to redo the work, and then realized that it was great because I could put the text in the black area.
 
That was a huge lesson for me as a beginner: Sometimes a “terrible mistake” turns out to be a great, unplanned discovery. In all these years after, when I have made other mistakes, I know to stop and wait and see if they will turn out to be valuable lessons and images or sounds I can work with.

 You’re now living in the digital world so you don’t have the huge problems with the cost of film stock, or the hardship of cutting on a flatbed—which in a way was great, but I do think it’s wonderful to have the ease of editing on a computer—but no matter about the technology, it’s always hard to start being a filmmaker, and it’s always hard to continue. There are wonderful things about making a film, but a lot of it is simply very hard work. Thinking. Writing. Shooting. Directing. Editing. Sound editing. None of that is easy, so it’s best to know that, and then you can keep going, because you can think, “Oh no, this is so hard!!” and then remember that it is but that in the end, if you do all the hard stuff, you end up with a good film, and all the pain of the hard work is forgotten (until you start working on the next one.)

 By the way, I also shot all of those with black & white film stock because I’d been a b&w photographer and loved how it looked—and I made 5 more b&w films; the first one in color wasn’t until 1993. 

 My last advice: BE ORGANIZED. It may be “exciting” to have your footage and you just want to go ahead or you may be “too busy” to keep things organized, but you will suffer, and you will waste so much time if you don’t stay organized. You need to know where your clips are, you need to name them so you can edit sensibly instead of editing with files called 0001, 0002, etc. Taking the time to be organized does not conflict with being creative. Quite the opposite: Taking the time to be organized means you can work smart.

 Good luck! Have fun!  Keep working!

 Su Friedrich
April 8, 2026