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Steve Yedlin's film emulation in digital imagery


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I said your own and I said hardly. It was obvious that I meant that an individual can make paper, from scratch and from start to finish, himself, but that it was inordinately difficult for him to make film, from scratch and from start to finish, himself. Kodak isn't a person.

 

If the industrial manufacture of paper ended, you could collect rags or wood pulp, build screens and presses, and make your own. If the industrial manufacture of film ended, you couldn't build a coating line, a chiller, or formulate your own acetate. You couldn't make your own film. The analogy with hand-made paper isn't a good one.

 

I think it's obvious from what I'm saying, and the way I clarified such, that the analogy was to be understood within a limited and particular scope. I said:

 

And like artists who buy handmade paper, there will be artists (or whatever else you want to call buyers of film) that buy film.

I'm not suggesting handmade paper and film are the same in any other way.

 

In other words, I don't have any argument with anyone suggesting there is a difference between hand made paper and film, such as that one is easy for one person to make while the other isn't. It's simply that this difference has nothing to do with what I am saying.

Edited by Carl Looper
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We've all done that, and I imagine making your own glass plates might be easier than acetate, but for film you need consistency over thousands of feet, chillers, slitters, perforators and the rest. Even Ferrania are having to make a pretty big factory. There's a minimum size. It's like newspapers- you can't print one, or even ten. 10,000, no problem.

Edited by Mark Dunn
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Well, you can make your own paper, but you can hardly make your own film. Even Ferrania is having a bit of bother ATM.

 

So I'm going to re-read this another way - not as some sort of rebuttal to what I was saying, but as a way of taking the discussion in a different direction, which is not a bad thing to do. So yes, it is difficult for a single person to make film. And yes, "even Ferrania" (which is a company) is having difficulty.

 

An interesting thing here is that it's also difficult for a single person to make paper. Not impossible, but generally speaking the paper maker won't go out and cut down their own tree (etc), or necessarily make all the tools they might use to make paper. Precisely because it is a bit difficult to do all that. Rather they will concentrate on their particular role in the "production line", leaving other aspects to those who make it their business to do those things (such as cutting down trees).

 

When one considers everything necessary for some object or thing to exist there's a ginormous network of inter-dependencies that are going on.

 

Now Ferrania is certainly not one person, but nor are they just the current group of people calling themselves Ferrania. Ferrania is also everyone who ever played a role in leaving us with the remaining assets of Ferrania, be it hardware, information, recipes, etc.

 

If Ferrania never existed, Ferrania today would not exist.

 

This is the nature of history. It doesn't just vanish. It can be put back into play.

 

My understanding of Ferrania is that they have encountered unforseen obstacles but that these are not in any way show stoppers. They just put the delivery date back further. What's another year or two anyway. It's not as if there is any particular deadline to meet. And what would be the alternative? Give up? Well that doesn't achieve anything does it? And they seem happy enough it's all quite possible. Or to put it another way I'm sure they would give up if they could see it was not possible.

 

C

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I mentioned earlier how one might create technology that gives a film look to digital. The idea mentioned was to interpose some already processed film in the optical system of a digital camera in order to get the desired result

 

Anyway I found a diagram that captures the basics of this idea:

 

lensesfig4.gif

 

 

Now I have no idea what a "Nipkow disc" is, but instead of this disc (whatever it is), one can replace that with film in the same plane. Not unexposed film, but already processed film where the processed film is simply that of a grey card. It's effectively a neutral density filter but one that has grain. The grain interferes with the incoming image prior to the image being encoded by the photocell. The effect of this interference is to mediate a greater sense of depth between the scene and that which is encoded by the sensor.

 

One can elaborate this to have a length of film passing through this plane so that the grain changes on each frame.

 

The diagram isn't exactly right (not sure of it's original purpose) as the photocell seems to me to be in the wrong place, but the camera lens/condensor lens setup looks about right.

 

C

Edited by Carl Looper
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