This film was a documentary about the transition from traditional film stocks to digital production processes. It was a very revealing film that went into considerable detail about the future of the movie industry and how technology is changing the way films are made from shooting to post-production and distribution. Last Fall I took a class about Cinema and Digital technology. This coming Fall I'm going to teach that class and I plan to show this film on the first night of class. I think it is a great, if brief, overview of the current debate about the transition from film to digital.
It talks about how digital technology, primarily cameras, has evolved from handhelds that looked like home videos to the latest camera technology that can create images that look like the highest quality of film 35m. The film also discussed how distribution is changing, moving from traditional film projectors to digital video projectors. Almost all the major theaters have changed from film to digital, even Art house cinemas have made the transition.
All this technological evolution leads to the question that the film posed to many famous film directors over the course of the film; is film as a method of capturing images dead? Has or will digital replaced film completely? George Lucas, prior to the film, said that "film is dead." Other filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, who made the recent Batman movies says film is still of use. Other directors also weighed in on the future of film. The consensus was the film is, indeed, dead. Although it still might have some use, like in the recent movie The Master which was shot in 70m. But, more and more, as the camera technology improves so that digital produces that grainy, painterly quality image that film cameras produce, using digital cameras, which are much cheaper, is becoming the instrument of choice among filmmakers.
The debate about digital or film is fleshed out in detail in an article by the two leading movie critics of the New York Times. They provide are better analysis than I could and provide a nice compliment to the film. I will be assigning the article in class.
I think the transition to digital has already usurped the movie business. From dogme95's The Celebration, which I will be showing the second week of class, to the big budget Superhero movies, digital cameras are becoming the method used most by filmmakers. I think it is a positive advancement that digital cameras can now capture video that is the same or very similar quality to 35m, or even 70m.
I just think about what to do with all those old films, lying around in canisters, slowly wasting away?
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