Death of Film continues...Eastman Kodak hires bankruptcy law firm

In taking a random check of still film from my negatives files as well as some unexposed rolls of film, they are all acetate. This includes B&W and color negative films as well as reversal films. So, unless things have changed over the last ten years or so (and why would they?), I would say that film for 35mm & medium format cameras are all acetate regardless if they are marketed toward the average consumer or professional.

-DLedin

 

Hmm. Perhaps acetate is stronger than I had assumed.

 

This is what I too wondered, because as you said, if there is a problem with estar in the film path, the camera would surely pay the price. I don't see the logic in making such a switch for pros or consumers.

The last unexposed 35mm still film I have is from 2010 and its Fuji (acetate) consumer stock. I also have some Kodak 120 film, but it is much older.

 

That's why I suggested ripping a sproket hole, that's where the film is thinnest. Stick an ink pen in there and yank if you want to be sure. Acetate will break, estar will stretch.

 

I thought I had done that. Just tried it...either I have a mix or I was imagining things.

 

Acetate can be surprisingly hard to tear unless you've got choppers like Dan.


If I remember correctly, if you took scissors and cut only half-way through estar you could not just tear the rest of the way through by pulling the film apart with your hands, you'd need to finish the job with the scissors.

 

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet in this thread. Good news for Kodak, and those of us still working on the film side of the motion picture industry:
http://news.doddleme.com/equipment/film-isnt-dead-kodak-signs-deal-with-studios/

There was also a short article about this in yesterday's LA Times business section.

-DLedin

 

NBC Nightly News did a short piece on this during last night's newscast.

-Steve D.

 

While I think the link you provided is very welcome news and information, the date on it is a year old. That's a bit less encouraging.

Is it possible you can post a link to more recent information? I might go looking for something from the LA Times business section, but whatever updates you can put your hands on would be useful.

 

There's also this:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/kodak-movie-film-at-deaths-door-gets-a-reprieve-1406674752

"Faced with the possible extinction of the material that made Hollywood famous, a coalition of studios is close to a deal to keep Eastman Kodak Co. KODK +0.04% in the business of producing movie film.

The negotiations—secret until now—are expected to result in an arrangement where studios promise to buy a set quantity of film for the next several years, even though most movies and television shows these days are shot on digital video.

Kodak's new chief executive, Jeff Clarke, said the pact will allow his company to forestall the closure of its Rochester, N.Y., film manufacturing plant, a move that had been under serious consideration. Kodak's motion-picture film sales have plummeted 96% since 2006, from 12.4 billion linear feet to an estimated 449 million this year. With the exit of competitor Fujifilm Corp. last year, Kodak is the only major company left producing motion-picture film."

 

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=studios+sign+deal+with+Kodak

-DLedin

 

Once Eastman Kodak stops producing motion picture film there will be absolutely no way they can continue manufacturing consumer film (now done under contract for Kodak Alaris). This deal is very good news for film still photographers, at least for the time being. I'm amazed by it actually.

The next hurdle will be to figure out how to keep film labs somewhat profitable. The Hollywood biggies Deluxe and Technicolor are out of the film biz. All that's left in Hollywood is Fotokem I think?

dan c

 

There are a few other labs in the area still.
Film restoration and preservation have become a significant part of the revenue stream. When you consider that there's over 100 years of film out there, worldwide, and the studios are still archiving on film rather than relying solely on a digital solution, I'm hopeful. Then again I have to be, it can be too depressing to think otherwise.

Some new shows are still being distributed on film. For example, Paramount's "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" which opens in about a week is being distributed, in part at least, on film. So it would seem that there are enough theaters out there to make it worthwhile for some studios to do a run of release prints.

-DLedin

 

The bar graph included in that story is utterly shocking. You can see Kodak and film production literally fall of the steepest of cliffs there. Whoa. Almost all of that, I'm assuming, is because of the rapid transition from film to digital distribution. Sure image capture has been moving away from film, but the real money maker was manufacturing the stock for prints that were sent to thousands of theaters around the world. That's all basically dried up. Also, without that work to do it's easy to see why Technicolor and Deluxe left the business.

I do hope film can stick around indefinitely as an alternative to digital for those who choose to use it, but even the new Kodak CEO is basically saying this is still an interim move to help the company transition into something else. What that 'something' will be is still mysterious. This company has had more bat$hit and misguided schemes over the past decade than I can count.

dan c

 

Are you sure? Productions certainly use far more stock than what ends up in the final film. Do you have any idea how much more that is on average?

 

I would think sending prints to thousands of theaters is a whole lot more footage than the average production may shoot, regardless of how large the "shooting ratio" may be for any given production.

-DLedin

 

Depends on the film. A large blockbuster: possibly. A much smaller film: maybe not. TV show: definitely not.

 

I'm almost certain about this, but unfortunately can't find exact data with the Google searches I tried. I'll keep looking for numbers though because I am curious. From what I have read (or perhaps heard somewhere from someone in the business), while a typical feature film will require a lot of film, the real frosting came from the hundreds of prints for every feature required for distribution. If you think about how many theaters operate around the world each showing prints of films not just made here but everywhere, the amount of film just going through projectors was staggering. To use an old cliche, Kodak has been bleeding out by a thousand cuts for some time. When the need for cinema print stock fell off the cliff, the last market for mass producing film totally dried up.

I'll keep looking for info. Wish @Vidiot didn't drop out of the forum.

dan c

 

I have a coworker who has a very different perspective on the situation. He tells me he used to work for a competitor of Kodak, and when Kodak bought them out and they merged into another company kodak had recently purchased they destroyed the corporate culture of both sub companies, fired everybody under a certain age and basically messed the whole damn thing up. He's completely thrilled the Kodak is going away, while there he heard stories of them swallowing up and destroying the corporate cultures and the financial well-being of other businesses in the field. One of their poorest decisions was to go with antiquated products because the new competing products started out expensive. Of course expensive never lasts, once the technology is established it evolves and gets cheaper and Kodak basically priced themselves out of the market on too many products.

 

I'm no Vidiot, but DLedin did answer whether raw stock or release prints used more materials. Different films have different shooting ratios based upon a given director's style. An average director may have a 20-1 ratio (requires 20 shots to get 1 usable take in the final cut). Bean counters keep strict track of how much raw stock every production uses. A crazy shooting ratio is 95-1 (that would be Apocalypse Now).

Clint Eastwood has a maximum of 3 takes, but he mostly tries to get what he's after in just one go, much to the chagrin of some of his actors who feel their best takes come around take 5 or 6. Stanley Kubrick may have been famous for shooting 100 takes, but he was very conservative about his budgets and would only have a small number of takes actually printed to use for his work prints.

Visual effects in the time of photo chemical composites would have generated much more raw stock useage, but that is no longer a concern.

Even the few movies shot on film today are screened (dailies) and edited digitally.

To summarize, if Apocalypse Now had every piece of raw camera stock that was exposed, printed (and they probably really did do that on that production), then all of the materials that made up the Original Cameral Negative plus positive printing was equal in raw film stock of just the first 192 release prints. There have been thousands of prints struck from that film.

 

Exactly. Well said.

-DLedin

 

Thanks, guys. I meant to write that the ratio is based upon footage, so a shooting ratio of 20-1 is 20 feet of exposed film yield 1 useable foot (one second) of final 35mm footage.

 

I think it's a positive spin on a very sad story. I like to think there will always be some movies shot on film, but the sad reality is that it's so difficult to get film processed nowadays, the time and expense needed will put it only in the hands of very dedicated, high-budgeted (>$40M) projects. The days of little tiny indies shooting on film has pretty much gone. My bet is less than 10% of all major features will shoot on film, maybe even 5%.

The last time I counted, there are only three film labs in all of North America that can process 35mm negative, and that ain't good. I still haven't figured out where J.J. Abrams is getting the Star Wars films processed, because Technicolor/London shut down a few months ago, and I don't think Deluxe is around, either.

It's not quite as straightforward as that, but that's pretty close to the truth. The awful thing nowadays is that in the advent of digital, it's not uncommon for projects to shoot 500-600 hours of material and only wind up with a 100-minute or 120-minute movie. The last TV pilot I did, they shot 70 hours of material for a 45-minute show... but that was an exception.

Note that in a lot of cases nowadays, they shoot A&B camera simultaneously, so it's double the footage right from the gitgo. I think the most footage I've ever seen for a project was Dreamgirls, which had about 400 hours of material. That beat out the previous record-holder for me, which was Blades of Glory at about 325 hours. In both cases, multiple cameras for climactic scenes are what shot the footage up.

A Kodak VP I used to know told me the highest-footage film he knew of was Charlies Angels 2, which I think shot something like 700+ hours of footage. He laughed and said they sent two crates of champagne to McG, the director, to celebrate. In fairness to him, I think about 1/3 of the footage was slo-motion (about 120-240fps).

 

They should have send the champagne to the editor. He probably was gonna need it.

 

I asked the editor of (uh... a certain film) if he was really going to watch all the dailies, and he rolled his eyes and said, "who the F can watch 12 hours of film? I'm just watching the circled takes and tossing the rest." So a lot of that extra footage was all for nothing. I've been screaming about directors shooting too much footage for at least 10 years, but it does no good.