Is Film Dead?
Going back to perhaps 2001 it seemed like film was going to die. Even a couple years ago this might have been a serious question with the pixel-ographers focused on digital or die propaganda, and the use of film plummeting. The reality is that the production of real, analog film was a booming business driven by commercial photography and the movie picture industry. A huge amount of film was used not just in filming the live images, but also in distributing the movies to theaters. Still photographers, while seemingly big users, were really just a small side business. Kodak evolved to take advantage of this huge business by scaling their production to extreme scale. Film was created on giant rolls and cut down in size at a massive level. As digital image making became more of reality the slowdown in film volume became a slippery slope. Digital post production effects and digital distribution meant using film was a huge amount of extra work, and like any business "efficiencies" were introduced. The big ship of Kodak couldn't be throttled to adjust to a slowing market and a huge number of films were eliminated. Film recorders, scanners and film cutting machines were scrapped for parts and buried under dust and plastic. I totally understand the need for commercial users to switch to film ( money talks ) The unfortunate side effect was that artists who were tagging along for the ride so to speak were left with real fear that our materials would vanish. What I don't understand is why artistic photographers would think it was OK for their choice to be used to eliminate the choice for others. But wait! It seems in the last couple years the voice of the minority has been growing. Certainly in the art space film hasn't gone anywhere, but even in the commercial movie making space there are some pretty strong voices. Count J.J. Abrams and Quentin Tarantino as vocal fans of good old analog film! The problem was all of the knowledge built in to the industrial process of film manufacturing was at a scale not applicable to anything akin to small batch film production. Ilford seemed interested enough t These days in the news is the fact that Star Wars was shot on film! ( http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/help-star-wars-kodak-ceo-848593 ) Now the amount of film consumed by Star Wars pales in comparison to the amount of film that it would have consumed back in the 90s, but nonetheless Kodak seems to indicate they can perhaps adjust their volume to the present demand and return to profitability. But what about the equivalent of a craft brew beer in area of film. A couple are trying, New55 and Impossible are both interesting. From a technical perspective it turns out very little of what was learned in the 20th century is still applicable. One problem I mentioned above is the sheer scale of the older machines. The other is the large number of regulations around the chemicals used in the making of the film. It seems like these companies have to reinvent the wheel which is really surprising to many folks, myself included.