F I LM V D IG I TAL | FEATURE
We believed that we only had two or three years of people shooting on film
path of Heathrow Airport, west of London and, perhaps more importantly, less than 30 minutes from the Pinewood, Shepperton and Leavesden studios. Productions that were shooting abroad didn’t have far to go to get their film processed and to enter the post-production workflow without travelling into central London. At the time, joint founders Adrian Bull and John Mahtani were witnessing the entrenchment of film from companies like Ascent, Deluxe and Technicolor who were racing to detangle themselves from the business of film processing and distribution. Fujifilm had already left the film manufacturing business and even worse news was that Kodak, the only other large company still making celluloid was entering Chapter 11 – the US version of bankruptcy but with the lifeline of continued operations under certain circumstance. Maybe ironically Bull still saw this time as a business opportunity for a new type of film lab. “Five years ago the labs were typically photo-chemical lab operations so concentrating on the processing of film and photo-chemical printing,” Bull explains. “If you looked at the big post facilities of the time with these lab capabilities, certainly Deluxe and Technicolor, the creative elements like telecine and scanning side of things and restoration in terms of digital restoration weren’t necessarily co-located with the lab. So, if you like, the interface to the rest of the post-production world were relatively limited at those main locations as the film post-process would be transported into town to one of many post facilities
for dailies, telecine, sound synching etc. So what we focussed on six years ago was the belief that if we packaged as much of that digital interface around film to make it easy for people to shoot film, so that they wouldn’t have to deal with multiple vendors for a project. If it’s processed with us and we do telecine dailies, sound synching and that gets it to editorial so when they’ve completed an edit they send us an EDL, we can then do the final scans. We then deliver back the high res uncompressed 2K or 4K data that allows them to conform and grade their job. If they then need film deliverables at the end of it, they can send that data back to us for us to record it back out to film for projection or archive purposes.” This type of one-stop-shop approach was nothing new to post-production. In fact, over the last 20 years it has been a traditional business practice to ring fence budgets this way. But the challenge around the film side of things was that there were very different skill sets for the people who were involved in processing film compared to the more understood post-production services of telecine, scanning, restoration and grading. “Really it was taking those two components and bonding them together when there wasn’t a real crossover of skills between the two,” adds Bull. BUSINESS INERTIA On one level, the story of this film resurgence hinges on good business practice apart from the love of the medium. Cinelab got up and running and started marketing themselves to productions
that were eyeing digital acquisition to predominately save money. “There are two elements that are probably most relevant. One of them, which is always sensitive, is budget. There was an element, however, of us being able to provide some assurance that it can’t get out of hand as it’s one company dealing with all of the work,” says Bull. “The second thing that goes hand in hand with that is the reliability of the delivery, the quality and turnaround. Having a single contact for everything means you are not chasing maybe three companies for news and updates on processing, scanning or telecine.” Cinelab wasn’t entering the film processing business hoping that film’s popularity curve would suddenly turn upwards, they had a plan. “It was the middle of 2013 when we established Cinelab,” says Bull. “In our business plan back then, we believed we only had two or three years of people shooting on film on any sustainable level. But realistically we knew we would have to transition the business to primarily an archive one around digitalisation and restoration. But what’s happened almost
IMAGES Some of the movies that have been through the doors of Cinelab UK
APR I L 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 53
Powered by FlippingBook