This isn't a strict 0-to-3 upgrade ladder. It's one hardware platform (the player) with parallel paths of increasing convenience for getting your own footage into it. Levels 2 and 3 are real directions, not promised release dates. "If there's interest" applies to everything below marked future.
Original players and cartridges are real and findable: mostly Disney animation shorts, plus rarer sports-training and action-film cartridges. No purchase required to explore this. See the history section.
The rebuilt device. Plays existing original cartridges as-is. This is the sellable product at launch. Everything else on this page is what comes after it, not a substitute for it.
A guide for opening an original cartridge, removing the old film, splicing in your own 8mm footage, and rebuilding the cartridge. Real today: no further engineering required on our end. This is expert-only: not a casual weekend project.
Requires real film-splicing skill. If a rebuilt loop doesn't feed smoothly through the gate, do not force the handle: you can damage the mechanism. Full difficulty and skill-floor notes ship with the guide, not summarized here.
New cartridges (3D-printed via SLA initially, injection-molded if volume justifies it) that you load with your own film without cracking open a vintage original. Depends on securing Kodak as a film-stock supplier; the splicing process itself is already understood from the DIY path. Smoother entry than Level 1's hard mode, and now the one actively being built.
Three things we'd want to see loaded into them first: wedding and partnership keepsakes, family and child portrait loops, and craft or legacy portraits: someone at their bench, doing the thing they're known for. All three are worth commissioning and worth keeping, and all three are better held in the hand than scrolled past. Winding through one yourself is the point of it, not a nostalgic detour on the way to watching a video.
Submit digital footage; a film recorder writes it to Super 8 film, and it's shipped preloaded in a cartridge: no film or footage handling required. Depends on separate work on an OLED-to-Super-8 recorder (anamorphic squeeze optics). The smoothest possible entry point, and the furthest out. Contingent on interest in Levels 1 and 2 first.
This is the level that makes the keepsakes above commissionable by anyone: a wedding, a portrait, a workshop afternoon, sent as files and returned as something you wind through by hand.