I have a Lomokino, and have shot several rolls in it. It's fun to use, but the real work is in the scanning.
The Lomokino shoots 1/2 motion picture format frames, which equates to 1/4 of a 35mm still camera frame, very panoramic in aspect ratio. So therefore a "36 exposure" roll of film should yield 144 frames. At 4 frames per second (typical hand-cranked speed) this yields about 36 seconds of footage. Except loading the film in the camera, you use a longer leader on the front of the roll, since the film has to be looped up and behind the upper roller, then down, past the film gate, to the lower takeup spool.
To get the most stable moving image, you have to be very critical about how you crop each frame while scanning the film strip. I find it helps to align your cropping tool box in the same corner of the frames during each scan, and to ensure with the crop that each frame is the same size.
Batch-processing the whole set of frames is the most practical method, after scanning, to get the tonal inversion and PS adjustments you desire in the final image. You want to be consistent that all 144 frames (from the 36-exposure roll of film) get processed identically.
Hidden within Lomo's website is an article about a piece of software someone wrote to automate the cropping procedure. It uses the space between the frames to determine where to automatically crop the images. The problem with it is that if your images are under-exposed near the edges, the software can't easily see the correct spacing between frames.
Available for sale is the accessory Lomokinoscope, where you load a roll of footage uncut into the viewer and handcrank it, holding it up to a light source to see the footage on a frosted white screen. Lomo also sells an accessory bracket permitting you to attach you iPhone to the front of the scope and record the hand-cranked footage into the phone. But scanning each frame separately does a much better job, plus with the Lomokinoscope you have to buy these special little cartridges for storing each roll of film; once you load a strip of film into the cartridge it has plastic pawls that attached to the sprocket holes at the end of your film, making removing the film from the cartridge possible only by tearing the sprocket holes out. Their business model seems to be making money from selling these accessory items, whereby you store each strip of film, after processing, in its own cartridge. Except it then makes scanning almost impossible, so you sort of have to decide to view the footage either optically using the scope, or scanned and digitized into a video. Of course, because of the frame size and rate, projection of the film through a conventional 35mm film projector isn't practical.
It also helps to hold the camera as steady as possible using a tripod, since hand-cranking the camera also introduces camera movement of its own.
The shutter speed of each frame is 1/100s, so I use a light meter on the scene and set the aperture adjustment lever according to what the meter recommends. The aperture adjustment is continuous in its range, so you can extrapolate to in-between f-stop values if needed.
For creating a finished video using the folder of JPEG images from the scan, I import them to my video editing software (Pinnacle Studio 14) as still frames and then reduce the time duration of the whole set to a fraction of a second each. There's probably animation software that does a better job of importing still images into a movie.
Typical frame-rates for the Lomokino are 3-5 frames per second, depending on how fast you turn the crank. You can also turn the crank very slowly and do single-shots at a time, for stop-motion animation.
The shutter of the Lomokino is very much like any of the other Lomo point-and-shoot film cameras, a simple one speed shutter. The elegance to the camera's design is in the film back part, as you crank the film it cycles a little lever forward that trips the shutter lever on the front half of the camera after the appropriate number of sprocket holes as per the camera's image size.
I've noticed the independant and art film maker community here in the US has not yet picked up on the Lomokino as a fad, like it did the Fisher-Price Pixelvision of the 1980s. Only time will tell. In the meantime, there's a Lomokino channel on Vimeo, and Lomo's website frequently features newly posted videos.
~Joe
