Gautam Valluri

Thank you Dom! I will check with Du-All right away. As far as I know, not many people have the Scoopic in Europe and therefore it is difficult to get it repaired.

Hello All, My beloved Canon Scoopic has an issue in the lens. It's completely out of focus when completely zoomed out and only in focus in the middle-zoom range. I'm guessing some intra-lens elements must've moved due to some shock effect (I had carried it on some travels but always in cabin baggage). Where can I get it repaired? I have the repair manual but I'm afraid I'm not very dexterous with major repairs like this. I'm based in France but am willing to ship the camera if I can get it fixed. @Will Montgomery any tips? Thanks in advance for any help!

To build on Uli's suggestion, if saving money on your filmstock is an absolute necessity, I would do a pre-shoot on a cheap video camera or iPhone and do a rough edit a day or two before the actual shoot. This allows you to not only make composition decisions but also to rehearse with the actors to see what works and what doesn't. This way, on the actual principal photography everyone knows what they have to do and you can get everything you need in 2-3 takes.

Just got the latest price list from my Kodak rep in France. No significant change. She said the prices will be updated later on but for the moment they remain unchanged.

Aren't there precious metals in trace amounts in digital camera circuit boards?

Hi Alan, Is this still available? What’s your asking price? Thanks, Gautam

Hi, I'm going to check out an Arri SR2 in Delhi early next week for a potential purchase but the seller doesn't have batteries to run the camera. Is anyone here based out of Delhi and could lend me a 12v battery for an Arri SR2? Thanks, Gautam

I’m jealous Aapo, all I ever seem to get as gifts are shirts I’d never wear or book I’d never read

I'm very hopeful for film in general. Having worked in the film restoration industry in France, all the state-funded restorations are required to be printed back to film for long term archival purposes. Hiventy, the biggest commercial film lab in France makes a large percentage of their business only with restorations. The CNC (France's national film organisation) estimates to have spent 13.5 billion euros to restore about 15000 films since 1990 (average 90,000 € per film x 15,000 films). This is all tax-payer funded and this is only France- I'm guessing at least Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and most Scandinavian countries have similar restoration policies and budgets. A lot of recent digitally-shot productions are going through an "analog intermediate" to add texture and natural grain to the final image. Dune is the best example. Guava Island is a smaller production example- both look fanstastic. FotoKem has their new SHIFTai service which does this as well (https://shiftai.fotokem.com/) And the fact that filmmakers like Chris Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, PTA, Wes Anderson, Steven Spielberg, David O'Russell, Darren Aronofsky, Pablo Larrain, etc shoot a million feet of film for every project... All of this is Kodak. I think they're ok for now even if they're no longer propped up by the studios. We need companies like Orwo, Ferrania et al to step up for the small guys. It's a wonderful opporunity to grab this part of the market and it surprises me that no one is doing it. Ilford does 100ft bulk rolls already for their B&W stock, why not do the B&H perfs on them and sell 400ft and 1000ft rolls? Especially considering that there are only 7222 Double X and the two Orwos on the 35mm BW motion picture film market.

I see where you're coming from. I do agree with you about Kodak's monopoly and I don't like it either. I'm hoping that Orwo will deliver on their promise of a new colour film stock and going by how their BW stocks are priced, price them low enough so Kodak will have to rethink their prices. If only Sony bought the Fuji stock workflow and brought them back on the markets, they could give Kodak some much needed competition.

Matthew we all want film to be cheaper and more accessible. I'm just finding it hard to understand what you want to say. I went back and read all your posts and it oscillates between "Kodak is killing its business by raising prices" and "not sure people want to shoot on film anymore". Your messages also sound angry, but I'm not sure if you're saying "forget film and shoot digital" or "I'm annoyed that its getting more and more expensive to shoot on film and its not fair" I'm genuinely interested in understanding the point you're trying to make, if you feel like elaborating a bit.

So eloquently put. Indeed there are many of us, we just silently go about our business.

Maybe make the 500T cheaper than the others? As an independent underground filmmaker with no external funding, I feel like the entry-level celluloid filmmaking is getting more and more out of reach. Here in France we have some artist-run labs and most of the young filmmakers here are scraping the bottom of the ebay barrel for expired VNFs, Ektachromes and EXRs. I feel like if Kodak could have the 500T more within the reach of entry-level celluloid filmmakers, especially in 16mm, it would bring a lot of people back to film. Also, Super8 needs to be much cheaper and not almost as expensive as 16.

Another way I can imagine doing it is shooting it with slow shutter speeds to get some painterly motion blur and just shoot at 25 fps. In the edit you could decide a pattern and cut out/ repeat frames as required. For 25 fps, I would probably cut out two frames after every frame and probably double the frame I left in. For example take frames A, B, C, D, E, F, G and perhaps make it something like A, A, D, D, G, G and so on... I've done some step-printing on an optical printer and I did lots of tests of various patterns to get the effect I wanted. It always came down to getting the right cut/repeat pattern of frames. One can also let the "projector" side of an optical printer roll out of sync to create motion "streaks". If nothing else, I suggest that you do lots and lots of tests before hand. Find what works for you, before you shoot your final scene.

I remember reading that Brad Bird and Robert Elswitt had to shoot the sandstorm IMAX sequence of Ghost Protocol in Super35 because the 15-perf footage was not registering the sand particles as they intended... Btw Dune looked amazing in the cinema...I second the score being too insistent, was taking away a bit from my experience. Who's going to tell Hans to cool it a bit in the sound mixes?