One roll, no retakes, no editing, and one nerve-wracking premiere – welcome to the Straight 8 filmmaking competition

Watching a film you’ve shot for the very first time in a crowded movie theatre full of film buffs and keen movie makers alike sounds pretty intimidating. Combine that with not having any idea what the final edit of said film looks like, then you might have the most intense idea for a moving image crit we’ve ever heard of… or the final screening of a magical filmmaking contest.

This thrilling setup is a signature of Straight 8 — the super 8 cartridge, no editing film competition. Open to anyone brave enough to give it a go, the global filmmaking challenge has been going since 1999 with a yearly offering of this movie making model to its applicants: Just one roll of super 8, no retakes, no editing, no post production… oh and a soundtrack (that you make blind), that they line up with your first frame. The first time you see your film, if it’s selected, is when the audience does.

This fearless idea started 25 years ago when founder Ed Sayers asked 20 or so of his colleagues, also working in film and production, to have a shot at a challenge he had been considering for a while: “to try and make a compelling short film on a single roll of super 8 film (lasting 3ish minutes), without retakes, shot in story order, editing only with each pull of the camera’s trigger”. For the competition’s first screening, the group put up the first 22 films, “sight unseen” at a West End cinema in London on a Friday night. “It was rammed and the atmosphere was electric,” Ed tells us, “soundtracks were played off audio cassettes from the projection booth, pressing play as the first frame of picture came up.”

Cut to 25 years and some 3000 films later, the competition is still going in full force without straying from its humble beginnings. “What all the most successful films display is that the makers know their intention and stay true to it, double down on it, and keep the audience leaning in.” What it all boils down to for Ed is “a celebration of intention… There’s so much roughness, there’s a kind of transparency to the results,” he says, “the audience feel as if they are part of every moment that is a success or failure.”

Having never set a theme for the competition, filmmakers are free to come at it with entries from all kinds of angles — “I think that keeps it really fresh as the zeitgeist moves ever onward,” says Ed, “every year it’s like a big juggernaut turns up with a delivery for us and there’s all this insane energy inside it. The truck looks familiar but when we open the back doors, out pours all these amazingly distinct creations. You’d think that after 3000 plus films we’d have seen it all, but this year once again proved there’s always more to see.” In amongst the top 8 films for 2024’s contest you’ll find tutorials on how to take a nude, people in spider costumes, and an incredible spaceship simulation.

The 25 best selects from the 2024 entries were screened in May at the BFI Imax in London, with the top eight premiered in the Cannes Film Festival this year. Continuing the straight 8 tradition of seeing their “rushes, first cut and world premiere all at once, in an audience of your peers: friends, colleagues, competitors and clients”, the 2024 contestants produced an eclectic range of genres, stories, styles and propositions for the big screen with the thrill of letting go of some control over their movie making to let in a little bit of analogue magic.

“It’s a rare example of a real shared experience between filmmaker and audience alike. In no other premiere scenario is the director so un-used to their film – because even they haven’t seen it yet. Although great executional moments are appreciated, it's the attempt to tell a compelling story really well on the big screen that unites the audience and filmmakers,” says Ed. With exciting new plans on the horizon and 25 years of the competition under their belt, there’s a lot more to come from Straight 8. Ed concludes: “The plan is to keep the simple challenge alive, offering people the opportunity to try to make a piece of big screen cinema on the smallest film format.”