This delightful, fleet-footed film represents a labour of love both for its writer-director-producer-editor, Briton Ed Sayers, and his many, many collaborators who shot the footage on the old-school analogue format Super 8 all over the world. Between them they’ve used decades-old rigs in newfangled setups with film stock that, like several of the species seen here, would have gone extinct had it not been for the intervention of enthusiasts.
The brief from Sayers was simply to film nature, so we get shots of all manner of flora and fauna, ranging from coral reefs to high deserts, places populated by minute bugs all the way up to whales. As they come in pre-loaded cartridges, Super 8 reels can only capture a few minutes’ worth of film, and so this must have been a fiendishly complex puzzle in the editing room; all credit to Sayers not just for his own lovely footage and clever vision but for his nimble collaging of the whole thing together.
