Death of Film

[Frank Wylie]

The problem is that you can make paints and brushes in your shed. If there's demand, you can get a bigger shed. You can't make film in a shed. It's an industrial, not an artisanal product. It needs making, monitoring, finishing. You might mix a b/w emulsion, but what would you coat with it? You can't boil down your own trees for cellulose in said shed. You can't test it by spreading a bit on a board and analysing it with the Mk.1 eyeball.

If enough people won't buy it, or if the profit from somewhere else doesn't enable it to be kept on for old times' sake, it's gone.

 

Ron Lowry (ex kodak engineer) is giving classes on brewing your own emulsion and making your own sheet film. A quick search on Youtube brings up a hand-made 35mm film coating machine.

 

I really, really hate it when it is declared emphatically that film is obsolete, unreproduceable and gone unless you follow (insert pet path/theory here).

 

Film is surviving as a cottage industry.

 

Please do some rudimetary homework before declaring any format dead.

 

Try Orwo, Foma, Illford and Fuji to start with...

[Robert Lewis]

 

 

Try Orwo, Foma, Illford and Fuji to start with...

 

 

... ... or, indeed, Kodak. Then consider those who invested in VHS, Hi8 or Betamax. Those using film can still use their equipment and still get and use a wide choice of filmstock. Those into Videography got their fingers burnt time and time again as manufacturers relied on obsolescence and in this regard little seems to have changed.

[Chris Elardo]

I think there will always be a market for traditional mediums. Think of all the zillions of fim cameras produced over the last century. There's a lot of investment in the equipment/workflow of film from the consumer and the labs that process it. Film as a capture medium will always be taught in schools and is recognized as historically important while still viable in the digital age.

 

I think the most important thing is that artists DEMAND CHOICE, and not let industry trends dictate how we create.

 

As far as traditional painting goes- I've never seen a computer art gallery, but I've seen plenty of traditional fine-art galleries. People know the intrinsic quality in a piece of art produced by someone who doesn't have an 'undo' button on their paintbrush. It takes vision and serious discipline to channel your creativity through such direct means. Technology isn't special. The artist is special! No one talks about the hammer and chisel Michaelangelo used. They talk about Michaelangelo. My fear is that technology is now being celebrated over the individual artist and I think that sucks. Just my two cents...

[Richard Tuohy]

Ron Lowry (ex kodak engineer) is giving classes on brewing your own emulsion and making your own sheet film. A quick search on Youtube brings up a hand-made 35mm film coating machine.

 

 

Well, the somewhat infamous hand-made 35mm film coating machine (which looks really beautiful) was made here in Australia by an ex-kodak engineer ... but the actual film coating component was taken from an old kodachrome coating machine. And that part is the guts of it. So don't get too excited about hand made coating machines.

I have Ron Lowrey's new book and have mixed my own bw emulsions and coated them on 16mm film by hand. Results are quite beautiful ... but they aint like commercial film coating results. Nor are the emulsions one can make at home anything like the emulsions made by a company like Kodak ... or even EFKE for that matter. You can make some very nice very slow speed blue or even blue and green sensitive emulsions. Colour? the closest one could possibly get is something like the dye bleach process. That would give very rudimentary colours and would be a real achievement.

 

Yes, if we loose chromagenic colour film, we will probably nonetheless have black and white, and panchromatic black and white at that for a very long time supplied by smaller manufacturers. But there is absolutely no denying that chromagenic colour film - the colour film that we have been used to for a very long time - is an industrial production process and requires industrial volumes to be viable.

[Charles MacDonald]

[quote name='Richard Tuohy' timestamp='1339545239' post='372487'

Yes, if we loose chromagenic colour film, we will probably nonetheless have black and white, and panchromatic black and white at that for a very long time supplied by smaller manufacturers. But there is absolutely no denying that chromagenic colour film - the colour film that we have been used to for a very long time - is an industrial production process and requires industrial volumes to be viable.

 

I recently saw a quote that ILFORD (Harman) has about 250 staff. that is enough to make a fairly good B&W film. They don't make it in Movie sizes as the cost to tool up would not be worth their while. They have also sworn off making any colour stock. again too costly to ensure profitability.

[Frank Wylie]

(snip)

Yes, if we loose chromagenic colour film, we will probably nonetheless have black and white, and panchromatic black and white at that for a very long time supplied by smaller manufacturers. But there is absolutely no denying that chromagenic colour film - the colour film that we have been used to for a very long time - is an industrial production process and requires industrial volumes to be viable.

 

All good points, but those volumes don't have to be the ones that Kodak established for their scale of operations; which seemed to be Total World Domination at full-tilt and the market be damned and take what we make...

 

Fuji went through a painful restructuring and diversification that seems to have paid off in solvency, and I'll bet that some of that had to do with readjusting their coating alleys and processes to a more rational volume for the existing markets and heeding the actual buying desires of their customers.

 

I don't mean to beat-up on Kodak, but they really seem inflexible in their outlook and seem determined to fly into the ground with Perez at the helm rather than adapt to changing markets.

 

So many people want to equate the death of Kodak with the death of film and that's just not a rational premise. It will be a blow, but it won't be the death of film.

[Bryan Chernick]

This was floating around on several forums back in March:

 

I just attended (last night) a SMPTE meeting of the Hollywood Chapter. The subject was "The Technology and History of Film, presented by Beverly Pasterczyk of Eastman Kodak Co." Ms. Pasterczyk is a chemist with film R & D at Kodak, and she mentioned that Kodak Research is currently engaged in the continuing design and implementation of new emulsions, such as the new version of the Vision III product.

 

Regarding consumer films, she said that they are considering restructuring a new approach aimed at producing these at a reasonable cost in much smaller volumes than in the past. She said that new technology will permit them to continue to produce these in "boutique quantities" using single coating machines rather than the huge multiple coaters of the past. She said that basically, as long as they had sufficient orders for a minimum of a single master roll "54 inches (almost 1-1/2 meters) wide by whatever length - no minimum stated", they would consider examining production in terms of the economics involved. Future production would primarily be on an "on demand" basis.

 

This would include the infrastructure for processing, probably at a single lab, either in Rochester NY, or sub-contracted.

 

"On demand" could conceivably include any film that Kodak has ever manufactured. Someone in the audience asked the inevitable question: "Including Kodachrome?" Her answer: "Yes, including Kodachrome". She added that while small runs of Kodachrome were unlikely, it was not out of the question, since they have had numerous inquiries.

 

To the question "How could this be made possible?" her answer was intriguing. "Volume is the answer. Consumer groups of large numbers of individuals could petition for the return of a specific film. This would include not only large companies, but also individuals banded together such as camera clubs, especially those with a large enough base such that they could collectively join on a national or even international basis".

[Richard Tuohy]

Well, maybe they could bring back TriX in Standard 8 which they have just discontinued! That decision seems at odds with the spirit of the above quoted announcement. If Kodak were to really adopt the above option, it would be quite a change from their recent behaviour.

[Charles MacDonald]

All good points, but those volumes don't have to be the ones that Kodak established for their scale of operations; which seemed to be Total World Domination at full-tilt and the market be damned and take what we make...

 

I don't mean to beat-up on Kodak, but they really seem inflexible in their outlook and seem determined to fly into the ground with Perez at the helm rather than adapt to changing markets.

 

 

Kodak did try once to resructure. They did a massive writedown of Film making capacity world wide. Harrow, Toronto Australia all no longer make film. Many coating lines in rochester were also scrapped, and repleced with Two lines, one of which is now out of service. From making film in a half dozen locations around the world that are down to ONE LINE. the infamous Building 38.

 

Now there are some that will argure that they should have perhaps kept one or more of the smaller lines, to have more versatility but the Building 38 Line is 100% state of the Art, and can handle the volumes they needed to make all those Hollywood release prints. the ones that will no longer be made after the theatres are forced to convert to Digital Projection.

 

Fuji has managed to add product lines connected with flat screen Tv sets and such, but as TV sets are no longer made in North America that market was probaly not open to Kodak.

[David Mullen ASC]

Kodak was screwed no matter who was in charge. Imagine going back in time 30 years and telling Kodak that within a short period in the future, demand for their products would shrink to a very small market, mainly replaced by an entirely different type of technology that was not photo-chemical at its base. Now if Kodak were mainly just thinking in terms of profitability, they would have ditched film even earlier rather than willfully march into a future of diminishing returns and shrinking marketshare. Imagine MacDonald's being told that at some point in the future, they would be about as big as a local franchise of a ma-and-pa eatery. No company that large wants to become that small.

 

We all want Kodak to stick around because we like the products they make, but companies don't create products for altruistic reasons.

 

Right now, it seems what will happen is that either a much smaller Kodak that emerges from bankruptcy figures out how to make their products on a smaller scale while maintaining profitability, or some other company emerges to do so, if they can. But there is no guarantee that it is possible since such a huge chemical industry has to support film production and processing -- plus it uses SILVER.

 

Maybe if Kodak had started a long time ago, we're talking decades ago, to become dominant in electronics, sensor-making, etc. it could have survived as an image-making technology company and kept film going on the side, though again, shareholders would have demanded that Kodak prove that it was still profitable to make film at that point.

[Bryan Chernick]

As part of the bankruptcy Kodak could be broken up into several smaller businesses including a smaller film company. That scenario may be ideal for those of us that want to continue to use film. We'll just have to wait to see what comes out in the wash. All those chemists and engineers that built their careers around film are going to want to do something if Kodak stops making film. Maybe they start their own business. There are a lot of ways that film can survive.

[Charles MacDonald]

 

Maybe if Kodak had started a long time ago, we're talking decades ago, to become dominant in electronics, sensor-making, etc. it could have survived as an image-making technology company and kept film going on the side, though again, shareholders would have demanded that Kodak prove that it was still profitable to make film at that point.

 

I have heard folks say that part of the problem was that the margins on film were (say 20 years ago) much higher than on Digital, and if Kodak had pushed agressivly into digital cameras they would have suffered ecconomic pain buy replacing profitable legacy products with unproven, hard to design, low margin products.

 

Remember that Kodak made the FIRST digital camera, and has had several methods of making prints from digital, including both wet and dry colour paper, (the Kiosks taht use the dye sublimation, the ink jet, various photopaper exposed by Laser, etc. Once the electronics folks got involved, Consumer cameras became a 6 month turnover item like other electronics, and many of Kodak's advantages in making consumer cameras became either disadvantages or redundant.

 

The consumer using a 20 dollar Instamatic X-15 might use 5 rolls of Kodacolour a year, collecting a 100 sheets of Ekatacolour paper, and indirectly consuming Kodak Chemicals all run on Expensive Kodak Photofinishing equipment that was covered under Kodak Service contracts. In those days Photofinishing Labs were a bigger business for Kodak than Motion Pictures.