NovaSCOPE
NOVASCOPE and Making 9.5
Part 1 - The NovaSCOPE Story
(As told to Martyn Stevens by the legendary Patrick Moules)
“When I moved to London in 1967 to attend college, I was already a 9.5er of several years’ standing, and I was soon rubbing shoulders with many of the personalities of the then amateur cine world many, alas, no longer with us. I should perhaps set the “scene” a little here of late 60’s/early 70’s London, at least as it applied to the world of cine! By 1970, Pathescope had been gone for a decade, and prognostications about the doom of 9.5 were commonplace. In a couple of years it will be a half-century since Pathescope’s demise; many of you who ticked the “very old indeed” box on the Flickers Questionnaire would have been young, vigorous and active in 1970, and there was a thriving market in second-hand 9.5 films and equipment. If only I had known then what I know now (and had the money!), I could have stockpiled untold treasures.
Video had yet to make any serious inroads into the home cine market and we often had to make do with moving blobs on black and white Standard 8, with ghastly dupes taken from horrid originals. Nowadays, DVD’s of even recent films are given away with newspapers; then the Kinematograph Renters’ Society (KRS) terrorised innocent film enthusiasts with their completely over-the-top defence of film copyright. They hated people owning films only slightly less than they hated the tiny minority who actually wanted to copy them illicitly. The KRS mob saw potentially huge losses of income from evil amateurs, maybe as much as 19/6d every single year!
This was all part of the background to a plan hatched in about 1970 by Paul van Someren and myself. Paul’s life was sadly cut short in 1984, but he was a stalwart of the 9.5 scene and edited the Group 9.5 magazine for a while. We believed 9.5 could show its superiority by demonstrating just how good new 9.5 films could be in contrast to Standard 8. A lot of equipment used by either Pathescope or other distributors was still around, salvaged by Larry Pearce and others when Pathescope folded, and some triple negatives had survived. We thought there could be a market for releases completely new to 9.5 and maybe some old favourites, too. The name was easy – Pathe-scope had gone so we were Nova(new)-Scope.
We managed to get our hands on a good range of equipment. First, a perforator that took 35mm unperforated film stock and made five rows of holes - three 9.5mm strips and two outer rows for the “pilot” perforations. This was installed in the basement of my flat in Fulham, which was nice and dark. We planned to perforate first and then print; most Pathescope releases were done the other way round. With B&W, a red light could used to give us some illumination. This process was by no means straightforward. First, unperforated 35mm stock was rare, and suppliers often insisted on very big minimum order quantities, leaving us with large amounts of film to finance and store until use. There was also a problem of adjustment – some of our early prints came out on stock where the 9.5mm pitch was just a bit too long, and led to an unsteady picture. There was then the problem of processing, of which more later.
The second item was a step-printer, which used a 16mm negative, the image from which was split into three by a beam-splitter, focussed onto the triple-perforated raw stock and printed frame by frame. This was set up in a large built-in wardrobe in Paul’s flat in Parsons Green. This too had to operate in dim red light. Martyn Stevens helped me install it; we managed to blow some fuses by hammering a nail thru a cable. Happy days.
As a sort of item 2a, we had a continuous printer, which took triple negatives and ran them thru a gate in contact with raw stock. This would enable some old Pathescope negatives to be re-used.
The final link in the chain was a slitter, which separated three 9.5 prints from the two strips of pilot perforations.
Ah! If only it was that simple! The problems were legion – where to start? I mentioned above the infamous KRS. Rights were a real problem, as we would be publicly selling films. We had to make sure we had covered this issue. In those days, before Disney allowed sound (Sound!) extracts on 8mm, it was next to impossible to persuade anyone who owned film rights to allow their use. Big collectors such as Rohauer and Monkhouse jealously guarded their rights and made money from sale thereof to TV etc. No argument that they could not lose out from a handful of sales on an obscure gauge would sway them. From the start, therefore, our choice of releases was severely circumscribed. We had to rely on films where, for some unusual reason rights had expired or where other distributors had secured rights and were willing to share. Breakspear films and others were very helpful here, but it did mean that modern films were simply not possible.
Then there was the finding of a negative, or a good print from which a negative could be made. A specially-graded “soft” negative was needed for the printing process to offset the increase in contrast associated with reduction printing. Once the negative was sorted, careful tests had to be run for each film to determine the correct exposure. Pathescope had used a system of notches to change light levels for different scenes; we could not aspire to such sophistication and had to rely on a good negative prepared for us by a specialist laboratory, but we still had to run some test footage and have it processed to check. As you can see, the costs are beginning to mount up.
And at the end of the day, that was the root of the problem. Film stock was expensive, and having to buy it in large quantities meant a very large financial outlay that would only be recouped gradually as films were sold. Processing, too was costly, especially when test footages were taken into the reckoning. Few Labs were willing to take on our small quantities and the extra problems of processing triple-perforated stock, where special care was needed to avoid problems around the sprocket holes. We ended up using labs who specialised in microfiche/microfilm work, as hardly anyone else did B&W. And at the other end of the process, collectors were not willing to pay economic prices for old silent films on 9.5. The second-hand market was there to depress prices and, of course, disposable incomes were so much lower in those days. So we had to shut up shop.”
More on Novascope and other film distributors, both Pathe and Independent, are in the History of 9.5 section of the 9.5mm Vintage Film Encyclopaedia, published 2020. Details are in What's New and will also appear under Books in Miscellany.
Here are reproduced the three issues of NovaSCOPE and the two issues of Novascope Review.
Part two is on the next page.
Part 2 - How 9.5 prints were made
Quite a bit of information on the trials and tribulations of this process are given in Part 1 above, but this seems a good place to go into more detail, adding pictures of some of the actual equipment used, much of it surviving from the Pathescope days.
A good starting point is this piece from Pathescope Monthly.
I am speculating a bit here, butI think Pathescope, given their high level of usage, must have been able to acquire bulk supplies of 35mm raw stock ready-perforated with just the outer two rows of guide or "pilot" perforations. In this way, prints could be produced and processed before the 9.5 perforations and notches if required were made. The advantage of this was that some of the problems that could appear around sprocket holes during processing, developing and printing could be avoided. Such issues, including "halation", were discussed from time to time in the amateur film magazines. For whatever reason, perforation of the 9.5 sprocket holes occurs at a late stage in the process described in Pathescope Monthly. This option was not, of course, open to Novascope who were producing films on a much smaller scale, and had to make all their own perforations, doing the whole lot in a single pass right at the beginning - finding unperforated stock was difficult enough as it was. Whichever approach is used, there is still the issue of ensuring at some point that the pictures and the perforations align, not by any means something Pathescope always got precisely accurate.
Both the accounts quoted above make clear how much of the work of the process was involved in preparing the production negative. Thereafter, it was just(!) a matter of running the negative through the contact printer in direct contact with fresh stock and then onto the slitter and Voila! (!), three 9.5 prints for sale. As Patrick says, if only it had been quite so easy as it sounds.
I wondered for years about a quirk of 9.5 notched films that left very sharp indentations in the side of the film opposite the notches themselves. They look and feel positively dangerous but don't seem to give any problems in projection or appear on the screen, although they certainly make cleaning hazardous. Patrick finally sussed it out, and I can best illustrate it with this enlarged view of the final image from the Pathescope Monthly article.
If you look carefully, you can just see the indentations I am referring to, but only on the right hand and centre strips of 9.5. Their absence on the left hand strip tells the tale - they are the result of a mis-alignment of the notch. The implication is that part of the notch is "left behind" in the form of these indentations and so the notch itself is less deep than it would otherwise be. I can't claim ever to have noticed, but I wonder if this didn't sometimes cause a problem of notches getting missed during projections. I don't know how Pathescope formed the notches, whether it was done at the same time and with the same machine as the 9.5 sprocket holes, but I have to say it seems to me bloody typical of Pathescope (I don't off the top recall if French Pathé prints are the same). The thing is wrong, could have been corrected and was not corrected, which can only be deliberate. The same lack of proper attention was no doubt responsible for many other faults such as inaccurate placement of sprocket holes between frames, soundtracks variable in quality and wandering in location and the loss of that wonderful clarity of image and focus that characterised the earliest 9.5 prints and which helps explain the continued fascination notched prints exercise. In short, it is slapdash and careless. It wasn't as though they were incapable of thinking accuracy, as these two pix show, but they failed properly to control their processes. The first pic I laboriously copied from an original faded French technical drawing (not a blueprint as such but that sort of thing); the second is from Pathescope Monthly.
OK, I will now go and take my medication.
Anyway, after that little digression, I return to the equipment actually used by Novascope to produce their prints, much of it cannily preserved by 9.5 enthusiasts from the Pathescope days.
Possibly the most inportant machine was the perforator.
All sorts of adjectives like solid, robust, heavily-constructed etc spring to mind when looking at this Pathescope original. In short, it is built like a tank and needed to be. Right in the centre of the machine, above the drive pulley, is the frame carrying the puches. This has to be driven up and down for each row of perforations. In sync with this, an intermittent mechanism (in this case a claw mechanism operating on the 9.5 sprocket holes) has to pull the film thru for the next row of holes. This makes a solid foundation essential for the operation, which at the least has to operate at the same speed as a silent projector, while doing a much heavier job, if the hours sat watching it, under a dim red light, are not to be too tediously prolonged.
At the other end of the process was the slitter.
Another stoutly-constructed Pathescope survivor, I remember this as a fearsome monster, capable of ripping 300' of triple- print into three strips of 9.5 (and two sets of pilot perforations) in the space of about a minute, accompanied by ferocious levels of noise. As I recall, this is a back view, the triple print being on the right here and the 9.5 prints on the left. Will try to acquire better pictures one day.
I have been working on one of the original Pathé peforators, capable in principle of punching three rows of 9.5 perfs plus 2 rows of pilot holes in 35mm. Or at least it could if only it had not been cannibalised/mucked about with and is so missing vital parts like the claw array that moves the film thru after punching and, indeed, if there was such a thing as UNperforated ACETATE 35mm available, which so far as I know there is not . Anyway, it's really only for historical value as I cannot imagine any commercial use. Incidentally, I had long assumed that all the perfs were made at once - this is what Novascope did. However, I suspect now that Pathé either made the pilot perfs first or even bought in or made themselves film with just the pilot perfs, making processing less tricky, and adding the perfs only at the last minute prior to slitting. This may help to explain the positioning of the perfs out of register with the frame line that one sometimes sees.
What I can't show you at present is the contact printer. Here, however, is the apparatus used to prepare the triple negatives, from a16mm duplicating print. 
Because of deficiencies in the triple lens intended to do the job in a single pass, Novascope were forced to do it three times with a single lens. Under a dim red light of course.
Finally, there were others who produced 9.5 films for enthusiasts, such as Walton Films. Here a a couple of pix of a 16mm to 9.5 perforator and slitter they used; note again the rugged construction. Pix courtesy of Graham Newnham.
The Triple Printer
The machines mentioned above, with the exception of the slitter and the Walton machine, came into my possession in 2020. My initial efforts at refurbishment concentrated on the perforator, but faltered at the obstacle of the claw, which was pretty much non-existent. In more recent times I have turned my attention to the triple printer; here is the story so far. It is divided into several parts because the software chokes on too big a file.
3printtext1.pdf
3printtext2.pdf
3printtext3.pdf
As a sort of addendum to the triple printer text, I am including a note on the triple lens. It was intended to be stand-alone so repeats some stuff already covered.
3printlens.pdf
The Perforator
I did a fair bit of work on the peforator when I first acquired the machinery, but I didn't include it on this site at that time - I think. I have now revised and extended it.
Perforator1.pdf