The first film camera (35mm) I ever brought was an old Nishika off Gumtree.

Nishika was a Nevada based company that has since gone under and doesn’t exist anymore and the N8000 is a poorly made bulky piece of crap with stickers trying to look like screens and a lead block in the bottom to make it feel more weighty because the whole thing is made of low quality plastic. Even the name is meant to sound Japanese (one of the few examples of Americans not flying the flag on almost anything they can).

The reason these cameras are so special despite their floors however is the lens setup. The N8000 is a stereo camera which takes 4 exposures at the same time through a row of lenses on the front. While this was intended for creating 3D hologram images, nowadays they’re used for making stereo gifs (which I’ve always loved) through a fairly simple method using Photoshop and lining the exposures up over the top of each other.

After watching a handful of music videos from ASAP Mob and Lil Yachty that utilize these sorts of stereo gifs I was super keen to give it a go. Unfortunately however my Nishika had worn out plastic cogs in the winding mechanism due to corrosion and stopped working 🙁 but not before I had a mess around and made a video or two with my gifs from last summer.

I do however intend to go throw some money at another Nishika when I can because they’re just so fun to use and the rarity of this sort of camera means that you can sell even a broken example and make some of your money back. I also feel I have a lot more learning to do, especially when it comes to incorporating these gifs into videos.

I intend to create a blog post about the process of creating stereo gifs too at some point.