Problems, mistakes and troubleshooting 1. Losing Film Footage in the Lab When we decided to process the film negatives ourselves, we knew there was a risk of losing some footage during development. We used 100 ft (30.5 m) daylight film spools in our cameras, but the Lomo developing tanks we had could only hold 30 m of film at a time, divided into two 15 m sections. This meant we had to cut the film in half before loading it into the tank. This process made it likely that we would split a usable shot in two, and due to the nature of the loading method, we also risked losing a few frames from each take. As a result, even in digital post-production, it would be impossible to seamlessly stitch the two pieces back together. To mitigate this, we decided to shoot duplicates with a second camera. We made sure to vary the timing so that if one camera's footage was split in the middle of a shot, the second camera’s take would remain intact – specifically by starting a second take at the beginning of a new spool. Unfortunately, despite our precautions, we still encountered issues. In some cases, the take that was cut in two turned out to be good, while the intact one had technical problems, rendering it unusable. The Kodak film stock we purchased came on 100 ft daylight spools, whereas the Orwo film arrived as a 122 m roll. This meant we had to manually roll the Orwo film onto 100 ft daylight spools. Occasionally, we accidentally loaded more than 30.5 m onto a spool, leaving us in the darkroom with an extra 1.5 to 2 m of footage, which we had to cut and process separately. Inevitably, this sometimes resulted in cutting a useful take in half. Losing 0.5 m from the 30.5 m footage during loading wasn't a significant issue. The part we had to cut off while loading the film into the 30 m tank was always the beginning of the spool, which didn't contain any useful shots, as that section was used for threading the film into the camera. 56