THOUGHT LEADER
W e’re in a new wave of demand for both still and motion picture stock. People love film. Film is physical. It’s a literal recording of the light from an actual event interacting with chemistry. Its photochemical basis means that it’s impossible for two frames of film to ever be perfectly identical. Digital imaging, by contrast, is about precision, control, reproducibility and breathtaking reach in distribution. And that’s not a bad thing. Romanticise 35mm projection all you like, but many of us remember when going to the cinema meant you might be watching a faded, dirty, scratched and spliced film print. We now have to think beyond shooting on film. Kodak can hardly keep up with the aesthetics. As crucial as the creative vision is, production teams must ask: what is the most sustainable choice?
Prevailing wisdom might suggest digital is always more sustainable than physical – but digital capture brings its own environmental issues. The Flint’s Neal Romanek investigates
It’s irritating. The film industry is built on excess. We want bigger, better, boomier. Nobody stopped David Lean to talk about sustainability when he blew up a bridge, and the train on top of it, for The Bridge on the River Kwai . But we’re living in an environmental emergency, so we don’t get to blow up any bridges for a while. DOWN WITH DIGITAL? Our knee-jerk assumption is that digital is always more sustainable than physical. It’s a natural reaction. First of all, it is sometimes the case. If you can shoot something against a green screen, rather than building a gigantic set in the middle of the desert, go with the green screen. However, we can also get tricked by the fact that digital solutions are usually invisible to the human eye. We assume that because we can’t see it, it doesn’t
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