Fear Not Film

The point of this blog is to reach out to the new generation of filmmakers and spread the news about the importance of understanding the craft of shooting on celluloid.

There is a new generation of filmmakers coming up that are excited over the newer digital medium and the adage that comes with it, "film is dead." When I hear someone boast of this it tells me that this person doesn't understand (and may even fear) shooting on celluloid. I am not a film purist, in fact I have just finished principal photography on a feature shot with the RED camera. But I do, and always will, prefer to shoot on film and if I would have had a choice, I would have chosen super-16 over the RED in a heartbeat.
The only advantage the RED had over super 16 in this instance was that it was cheaper, but not by much. The production still had to spend $8000 on hard drives for a triple back-up system.

I'm not here to bad mouth The RED. In fact it is a great tool and I enjoyed shooting with it and I will be shooting with it again on an upcoming project, but I need to set the record straight about the advantages of film, and that film is not dead. What I discovered with the RED in testing is that it demands more light in low-light situations-- if you want a pristine image with low noise you have to rate the camera at around 120. That can be quite problematic with low-budget filmmaking. The whole idea of this particular production's choice of using the RED was to save money, and of course, to impress financiers with the prestige and awe that comes with RED. However, we ended up having to pay for a generator, heavy duty lighting, and a crew to get the stop I needed. If we would have shot on the beautiful 7218 500 speed Kodak stock on this particular project, I could have gotten away without the generator, heavy lighting and the extra crew. I am not saying that shooting on film always allows for less light,. There will always be situations where you will need more light and power regardless of the format, but this project was designed to be kept small, and could have been kept small if shot on high speed film stock.

As I said earlier I am not a film purist but there is something more rewarding about shooting with film over digital. I believe that most peoples' fears of film stems from the very fact that shooting on film and shooting it well demands more skill! It also demands more vision and foresight! With film you are using an intuition built up over years of practice. There is no monitor to rely on or to double check exposures and ratios. It is done by eye and a lightmeter. There will be those who argue with me on this, but I assure anyone that it would be coming from a person who has failed on celluloid and embraces digital because of it's safety nets. Those who do shoot film well would agree that you can carry over your skills to digital with great success, but if you are only skilled in the digital world and shoot according to your monitor and histogram, you would find yourself in a bind if a project demanded to be shot on film.

-Bill Otto