Film is Over (if you want it)

First, I'd like to apologize for lying to everyone about having a new blog last week.  It just got really busy, and I couldn't get to it. At any rate, there's one now.  You're reading it.

Allow me to talk a little bit about why I'm a film maker.  It's because of this guy.

This is George Lucas.  You may recognize him as the man who created both Indiana Jones trilogy and the Star Wars trilogy.  You may also recognize him as the man who created Indiana Jones 4 and the Star Wars Prequel trilogy.  Maybe you remember him for American Graffiti, I don't know.  The point is this guy has been a big player in Hollywood for forty years. In case this is your first time on the internet, he also sold his company to Disney recently, and they now own Star Wars, (and no one is talking about the fact that they now also own Indiana Jones.)  He then took the $4,050,000,000 he made from the sale and is donating it to charity. Pretty hard to hold a grudge for Jar Jar Binks after that.

Now growing up a child of the 1980's, Star Wars had a huge impact on my life.  I once got a Yo-Yo in my stocking for Christmas, and the first thing I thought of is that I could pretend it was the little grappling hook that Luke and Leia use to swing across the big ravine while eluding Stormtroopers and escaping the Death Star.  The first film I ever made was a Star Wars movie starring myself, my friend Brian and my two younger brothers (which can be found as an Easter Egg on the DVD for Twelve Page Paper, a film which features a lightsaber duel between a college kid and Napoleon Bonaparte).  It's safe to say that part of the reason I got into film making was not to create films in the style of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman or Terrence Malick, but because I wanted to make movies in the style of George Lucas, Edgar Wright, or J.J. Abrams.

More my thing.

While I count Lucas as an influence, it isn't the reason I specifically point him out as to why I got into this.  See, George Lucas is why I can get into this.

George Lucas also created the EditDroid.  The EditDroid tied for the world's first computerized non-linear editing system back in 1984.  While it wasn't a success at all, it was tooled and re-tooled and eventually sold to Avid in 1993, who took the concept and ran with it making commercially viable and successful NLE systems available to the public.  Soon Apple released Final Cut and Adobe released Premiere to compete, and digital editing became the only way to go.

A little history.

This is a Steenbeck editing system.

Film was shot, processed, then spun on these reels.  The image was shown on the screen, and editors had to edit a film with scissors and scotch tape.  Literally.  Scissors and scotch tape.

Pictured: Hell.

An alternative was a smaller Moviola.

These machines were large, cumbersome, expensive, hard to come by, and most of all, required you to shoot on film, which required you to go through the process of storing, cataloging, processing, and developing film.  Apart from that, if you cut a frame in a spot that didn't feel right, you had to re-tape it together, then take out your razor and re-cut it until you got it right.

This is Avid.

Not only is it cheaper due to the fact that it's not a machine, but downloadable software, it is a million times more forgiving and useful.  The Moviola and the Steenbeck edited film, and film only.  And film doesn't have sound.  It's just pictures.  The sound is recorded separately on an entirely different machine. (Which is why clapboards exist.  The assistant camera calls out the scene and take number that is written on the board so that the editor can then match that audio with no picture to that picture that has no audio.  Then the clap is how they sync them.  The loud clap should fall on the frame where the clapboard is closed.  If you've ever wondered why they do that, now you know.)  What the Avid is doing is editing picture, sound, music, sound effects, and color grading, as well as visual effects and motion graphics, all at once.  This process would take weeks the old way, and cost much, much more.

The fact that this type of process is available to the public is the only reason I can do what I do.

But that's not all.  I've shot nearly everything I've ever done digitally.  I've used film a few times at NYFA, but I can safely say I will never shoot another film on film.  (Which is an odd sentence.)  It's getting to the point where it's nearly indistinguishable from digital, and once again, is extremely cheaper and more accessible.

The drawbacks of film are numerous.  Storage for one.  A film roll of 35mm film is about 1000 feet and can only shoot 11 minutes of footage.  A film trilogy like The Lord of the Rings (which shouldn't be considered standard, because it is nearly 11 hours long when finished) used six million feet of film, (or nearly 1,100 miles.  Roughly the distance from New York City to Orlando, Florida).

Then there's cost.  A brand new 1000 foot roll of 35mm film from Kodak is about $640.  Yeah, $640 for 11 minutes.  Just for the film.  Then take in the cost to process it.  About $0.16 per foot or $160 per roll, bringing your grand total to get a usable 11 minutes of film to $800.  Then the transfer to editable video is an hourly rate of about $300 per hour (generously).  Without transfer, this means LOTR spent $4.8 million on film alone.

It also is not viewable until it is processed.  Meaning you could record an entire day, and then find out there was a hair on the lens when you watch what you did the next day, making day useless, as well as the 90 minutes of film you shot (a.k.a. blowing $7,200).

Digitally, sound is automatically synced perfectly, you see what you got immediately, you can record for nearly six hours at full 1080P (a hell of a lot longer than 11 minutes) at the cost of a 64GB SD card (currently $49.95 at Best Buy).  You don't need to process anything, just remove the SD card and stick it in your computer.

Now dealing with big numbers.  LOTR used 6 million feet of film, at 1000 feet per 11 minutes means they had 66,000 minutes or 1,100 hours of footage shot.  Shot on film, it cost $4.8 million and took up the space from Manhattan to Disney World.  Shot digitally, it would have used 183 64GB SD cards at a cost of $9,167, and being that an SD card is the size of a 50 cent piece, would have taken up a space the size of a large shoebox. Or, being that SD cards are reusable and film is not, you could have bought two SD cards to interchange, and stored the film as you went on three 4TB External Hard Drives, also currently at Best Buy for $189 each or $567, plus the cost of two SD cards totals you out at $667.  A savings over film of $4,799,333 (or 99.986% off) and weeks of processing time.

Nerd joke.

Other advantages current film makers have: I currently am working on visual effects for a zombie film called Wasteland, shot by a good friend of mine from NYFA.  (If you have a second, and a few extra bucks, check out their Indiegogo page.  They're raising money to get through the end of post production, and it looks like it's going to be an amazing movie.)

Anyway, he shot the film in England, is editing it in England, and currently lives in England.  I'm working on the VFX in Lansing MI, and we're working together in real time.  Using Skype and Dropbox, he'll start an After Effects project, or send me a take, I'll get it in around 5 minutes, work on it, and send it back.  With film, it used to take longer to work with people in the same building, and we're not even on the same continent.

Now does this all mean the end of film?  Probably.  Kodak and Fuji have already stopped producing film.  There are people who are upset about it, and people who are thrilled about it.  Christopher Kenneally just made a brilliant documentary called Side By Side talking to directors, cinematographers and producers about the future of film and it's possible extinction.  (To sum up, directors are excited because they can see what they're shooting instead of relying on the trust of a cinematographer, cinematographers hate it because no one needs to trust them anymore, producers love it because it's cheap as hell. Ironically, Side By Side is streaming on Amazon Prime for free.)

The end of Side By Side brought up a really good question though, one worth discussing.  David Lynch makes a point that with the ability for anyone to shoot a film, we could flood the market with terrible movies by inexperienced hacks who are only holding a camera because they could afford one, and pirated a copy of Final Cut Pro.  

I think, what this could mean however, is a departure from studio gatekeepers backing only multi-million dollar projects with big names, back to old Hollywood.  Before the invention of the "blockbuster" (starting with Jaws or Star Wars), back in the 50's and 60's, studios made about a picture a week.  Poorly thought out stories, bad sets, overall really cheap films, all in the hope of just cutting a quick profit and moving on.  These films are why shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 could exist. It didn't cover up the great films, it just gave you more options, and more film jobs.  And out of that, some really great films sneaked through that made stars, instead of relying on made stars.  A person like Roger Corman produced some pretty terrible films, but without them, you would be missing a lot of talent today.  Corman's "Battle Beyond The Stars" featured visual effects by a young James Cameron, "Battle Beyond The Sun" the American version was directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola, 1977's "Grand Theft Auto" was the first feature film directed by Ron Howard, and "Boxcar Bertha" was the first feature film directed by Martin Scorsese.  Multiple actors got their starts with Corman's films as well.  Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern to name a few.  Today's tiny budget, all access digital films have the potential to unearth just as much talent as tiny budget films did back then.

Besides, all these movies were shot on film.

So let's not pretend digital film making is the only thing responsible for crappy films.