Moving every mechanical contact point to the edges of the film instead of the image area, and why the original design used vertical guide rails instead of tapered ones.

Fitting a real projector mechanism, gating, sprockets, frame control, into a mass-produced plastic toy was a genuinely hard problem. A word of respect for the engineers who solved it half a century ago.

How the day-to-day design loop actually works, FDM prototypes iterated six or seven times, carried around and tested by hand, before anything moves to SLA or metal for real.

Taking a toy built entirely around plastic-injection cost limits and building the actual ultimate version of it, the way car culture's retromod movement rebuilds a classic from the ground up.

The frame mask lives in each cartridge, not the viewer, and it's genuinely accurate to spec. But cameras expose more image than that frame shows, which is what makes an overscan option worth having.

No software, no electricity, no grid, and no way to copy it. What that actually means for something made specifically to be finite.

A short introduction to Super 8 film itself, what it is, where it came from, and why it's the format Loop8 is built around.

The first prototypes of a cartridge built for easy assembly, servicing, and swapping film stock, and what studying every generation of the original taught us before we started.

Why Loop8 is being built by a small company we're setting up ourselves in Sapporo, rather than handed off to a contract line.

The founder's batch of 20 is the prelaunch, not the campaign. A real Kickstarter is targeted for the next couple of months, kept deliberately small.

A teardown catalog of real failure points in the original cartridge, from a heat-staked drive gear to degraded lever arms, and what building for fifty years actually demands.

The homepage now opens on a real looping clip of the prototype instead of a photo slideshow, set in a font built from the original 1967 Hershey pen-plotter data.

A few practical notes for anyone sending in footage to appear as example stock under the DIY fills category.

There's no video element behind the Try It page's crank: every clip is a sprite atlas, sampled and tiled from real footage.

An orthographic scanner, a dozen makers' worth of tooling variation, and the question of whether a cartridge could someday hold double the film.

Twenty hand-built units, shipping December 2026: the first run is open for reservations.

Moving from in-house FDM prototypes to a commercial printing house, comparing SLS and SLA parts on finish, cost, and production method.

How to open an original cartridge, remove the old film, and refill it with new or current Super 8 footage, without wrecking the mechanism.

Laying out the groundwork for content creation, what it means to reverse, change speed, settle on a frame, and actually explore this as its own medium.

Reverse-engineering the original's optics, trying different lens configurations, and settling on bonded doublet pairs for the final path.

A dozen original players off eBay, taken apart one at a time, to actually understand what we were re-engineering before changing anything.

Before anything got finalized, the mechanism went through a long run of 3D-printed prototypes, each one testing a different way to actually make the crank turn film.

The mechanism doesn't care what gauge of film it pulls through the gate. A look at what a 16mm version of the player could actually be.

Taking apart real Super 8 cameras to build a film recorder, an OLED monitor driving the exposure directly, so digital footage can be written back onto real film.

A box at my parents' house, an old Fisher-Price viewer, and a cartridge that still played after all these years: the reason any of this exists.