Screen Daily
A
resurgence of interest in shooting on film has given a new lease of
life to the UK's film labs.
Four
years ago the death of 35mm production appeared imminent. The
collapsing demand for film prints and the rapid rise of digital
imaging technologies had combined to force Kodak into bankruptcy and
led Technicolor and Deluxe to plot exits from a century of film
processing.
Spooling
forward it is clear that predictions of celluloid's demise were
premature. Boyhood,
Interstellar, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Inherent Vice, The Imitation
Game and
Foxcatcher
were all 2015 Oscar nominated pictures photographed on film. This
season's awards front runners
Carol, Bridge of Spies, The Hateful Eight, Joy, Black Mass, Son of
Saul, The Big Short
and Steve
Jobs
are also, in whole or in part, 16mm or 35mm originated.
More
surprisingly, given their heavy VFX content, major releases Jurassic
Park, Spectre,
Star
Wars: The Force Awakens and
forthcoming Batman
v Superman: Dawn of Justice also
originated
on film. Film
recordings in production include Martin Scorsese's Silence,
Paul Greengrass' Bourne sequel, the Coen's Hail
Caesar and James
Gray's The
Immigrant.
In
addition, The
Hateful Eight
is getting a limited theatrical print run with producers The
Weinstein Company funding 100 theatres in North America and xxxx in
the UK with suitable projection equipment. Audiences will be able to
view a six minute longer cut of the 70mm film projected version.
“The
larger, film emulsion canvas offered by 65mm film creates images of
unusual resolution and depth, yet with a natural 'rolling off' of
highlights, even when digitized and presented later at lower
resolutions, says
Mike
Brodersen, chief
strategy officer at FotoKem, the LA lab which processed Tarantino's
opus.
While
no-one is getting carried away calling this a renaissance – the
overwhelming majority of studio pictures are shot digitally –
attention deserves to be refocused on the survival of film as a tool
of choice for filmmakers.
“Film
was once 'the'
capture
medium and now it is a capture medium among many others,” says
Christian Richter, Kodak's business manager for Europe, Russia and
India. “It has a very stable fan base of filmmakers who still see
it as the gold standard to tell their stories.”
Last
February, Hollywood re-committed to 35mm production. Disney,
Fox, Paramount, Sony, NBC Universal and Warner Bros.
agreed to
purchase undisclosed amounts of film stock from Kodak over the next
few years that would be enough to extend Kodak's film manufacturing
business.
The
world's only 35mm film manufacturer has $50 million of fixed costs
but the deal was enough for Andrew
Evenski, Kodak's president of entertainment and commercial, to
predict that the outfit would break even in 2016 and eventually
return to profit.
“This
is the plan and this
expectation is still true should
demand for
camera negative, intermediate stock for postproduction, and archival
and print film continue,”
reports Richter.
Kodak
also sought to extend film stock purchase to independent studios. In
May, it
introduced a program targeting UK indies with a budget package
including camera rental, stock, processing and transfer services.
Together
this has boosted the fortunes of the UK's two film processing
facilities. When
Technicolor and Deluxe folded their UK labs in 2012 there was a fear
that this might impact on decisions to locate international
productions here.
“We
didn't have a name that was recognised by studios in LA,” says
Nigel Horn, founder
and general manager, iDailies.
“There was a confidence building period.”
iDailies
acquired the redundant processing equipment from Deluxe and
Technicolor and signed a deal with Deluxe-owned finishing shop Co3 in
2013 to continue support for 16/35mm. “We've handled every studio
project shot on film in the UK since [Deluxe and Technicolor
closed],” says Horn. Most
high profile of all is Star
Wars VII, processed
entirely at iDailies (apart from 65mm sequences which was shipped
back to LA) with films transfers at Co3 London and the grade by Co3
in LA.
With
existing branches in Romania and Greece, competitor Cinelab London
opened in 2013, “lacking an established brand in the market,”
admits Adrian Bull, CTO and owner. “A lot of our effort has been in
marketing and getting studio executives through the lab for them to
have confidence in our service and our team.”
Suffragette's
16mm recording was processed there in 2014. This year Cinelab has
handled director James Marsh's project of amateur
yachtsman Donald Crowhurst; Gurinder
Chadha’s Viceroy's
House,
shot on location in India for Pathe; and Brad Pitt-produced Lost
City of Z
directed by James Gray starring Robert Pattinson and
shot
in Belfast and Colombia.
The
business plan for both labs was predicated on the gradual demise of
dailies, with a future trained on print archive services.
“We
thought we could only rely on [shooting] film for another two years
but what
has been a surprise is how busy we've been over the last six months,”
says Bull. “From
all our conversations next year will be busier.”
Both
labs are capable of processing 100,000 ft per eight hour day –
comfortably
enough to deal with three major features
simultaneously. “If
twice as many [films] are shot on film next year the UK might have a
problem, but realistically we still have the capacity to handle that
volume by increasing shifts,” says Bull.
“You
can't make a business from processing on its own,” he adds. “It's
about providing services that wrap around a production from sound
synced editorial, and scans of conformed material to film
deliverables like DCPs.”
While
photochemical processing may be a cottage industry in comparison to
its previous monopoly, it is sustaining a number of businesses across
Europe. German labs include TF CineNova
and Andec Filmtechnik and in France, Film Factory, Eclair
Group and
Digimage. There are further labs in Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland,
Hungary and Romania.
The
perception that digital recording is more economic than 16/35mm still
persists, but the argument has been largely discredited. While the
initial outlay for film cameras and stock may outweigh that of
digital media, the overall cost is balanced by the need to process
and store digital data. This can lead to more footage to review in
both the qc, dailies review, and editorial phases.
“In
digital you shoot more footage and you do more data transfers,”
says DoP Ed Lachman ASC. “Every time I've done a cost breakdown
between film and digital, film has come out cheaper.”
For
projects with shoot ratios as high as 100:1 executives might
calculate a high percentage of wasted film stock and urge a digital
route, although the counter argument is that this stockpiles
terabytes of unused data in post while negative running through a
camera tends to better discipline on set.
In
any case, as soon as celluloid
is recorded on set the dailies are scanned to a digital intermediate
and the post production route is then the same as any digital
origination. With costs being equal, more studios are greenlighting
35mm for VFX-intense features like Mission
Impossible: Rogue Nation.
None
of this would matter without the continued preference expressed by
directors in concert with their cinematographers for achieving a
distinctive look.
“There
is a resurgence in film, certainly in the heart of many who fear that
it will disappear in the future,” says Robert
Richardson, ASC who photographed The
Hateful Eight.
“There
is a softness to the manner film records skin values.”
Yet
for period thriller Live
By Night, Richardson
and director Ben Affleck opted for digital. “We
made a series of tests comparing 35mm and the ARRI 65 and the
decision was based on a look we created with (colorist) Yvan Lucas,”
he explains. “Digital was right for this particular aesthetic.”
Nonetheless
the
choice is not always a free one, says John
Seale ACS, ASC
who shot Mad
Max: Fury Road
digitally.
“Studios
feel that they will have more control of the image in post if they
demand a digital negative.”
Richardson
agrees; “Ideally
the choice to shoot film or digital should be a creative one but
recently there's been a greater degree of pressure from the financial
end to shoot digitally. There is no question that cinematographers
and directors on lower budget films will find it harder to shoot on
35mm.”
Most
artists do not view digital or film as better than the other but are
adamant they want to see film survive in order to be able to craft a
story with the most appropriate material.
“Most
shows now use multiple camera types, both digital and film, various
film stocks, sizes, digital codecs,” says Brodersen.
“The
palette available to filmmakers is vast, so our job is to provide
workflows that create a seamless process regardless of format.”
FotoKem
handled Steve
Jobs for
cinematographer Alwin Küchler who shot three distinct looks to
tie-in with each product launch: 16mm for the Macintosh in 1984, 35mm
for the NeXT in 1988 and going digital on Alexa for the iMac in 1998.
“Both
can be beautiful,” says Christian Berger, Oscar nominated for his
black and white 35mm work on The
White Ribbon and
acclaimed for his digital lensing of By
The Sea.
“Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether something is shot in grains
or pixels.”
Box
this: Emulsion emulates emotion for Carol
Director
Todd Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman selected Super 16mm to
photograph Carol,
believing the granularity of the print would resonate with the
story's emotional content.
“Even
today's 35mm stock has become so grainless it looks digital,”
contends Lachman. “Not all images or stories should be told in
photorealism. Certain stories lends themselves to digital work and
some lend themselves to the impressionism of Super 16.”
He
describes wanting to reference the look of the period between 1945
and the mid '50s. “The idea was to look at the work of early colour
photographers who used Ektachrome photos where the colour palette was
more muted than today,” he says. “We felt 16mm would capture the
feeling of colour separation and that this would relay the subjective
isolation and romantic imagination of the characters.”
Carol
was
one of the final projects to use the New York Film Lab, a joint
venture between Deluxe and Technicolor, that closed at the end of
2014.
“They
had $250,000 of equipment that was simply going to be thrown away,”
Lachman explains. “I enquired of the general manager if he could
let me have it. So now I am in possession of the only major lab on
the East Coast and I'm waiting for someone to come to their senses
and take it out of storage.”
Lachman
claims eight productions proposing to shoot film in New York are
stuck without a lab and will either have to revert to FotoKem, or
Cinefilm in Atlanta or be forced to shoot digital.
“There
is a resurgence of interest in film but in order to save film as a
tool for the future it is not enough to simply create with it,”
urges Lachman. “There has to be an infrastructure to support it.”
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