FEATURE | F I LM V D IG I TAL
WORDS JULI AN M ITCHELL / PICTURES VARIOUS RISE OF THE SUPER LABS FIVE YEARS AGO, USING FILM TO MAKE MOVIES, TV OR COMMERCIALS WAS SEEN AS ALMOST ARTISAN BUT THE COMPANIES THAT BELIEVED IN ITS LONGEVITY ARE NOW REAPING THE REWARDS P eople who perhaps should have known better were eagerly giving film, as a production medium, its last rites five years ago. The promise limitless take ability, film-like imagery and cheap media. How could the old stager ‘film’ compete with myriad cost-cutting workflows that connected digital capture with digital
post, broadcast, movie distribution and now streaming? Yet it takes more than a digital revolution to resign a 100-year-old technology to the ash heap of history. SUPER LAB Cinelab opened its film lab in 2013 in a large building in Slough, which is under the flight
of digital cinematography was huge, and still is, but the appreciation of celluloid ran deep. There was never a shortage of people wanting to shoot on it, but thought it was too expensive– maybe that was part of what we now call ‘fake news’. Looking back, you can understand the excitement around digital, with its almost
52 DEF I N I T ION | APR I L 20 1 9
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