Definition X The Flint: Film 2.0
Posted on Jul 16, 2024 by Samara Husbands
Is it more sustainable than digital?
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
We’re in a new wave of shooting on film. Kodak can hardly keep up with the 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 aesthetics. As crucial as the creative vision is, production teams must ask: what is the most sustainable choice?
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 exist – or if it does exist, it does so only in a very tiny way.
Robert Houllahan, director of Cinelab Motion Picture Services lab in Boston (not affiliated with Cinelab Film & Digital in London), believes digital capture brings its own host of sustainability issues, which need to be looked at carefully.
“For 100 years, all films were made into prints and distributed to theatres. That’s not likely something we’ll go back to,” says Houllahan. “But as things become more realistic with climate change – and the very real problem of creating energy which isn’t so persistently toxic as using fossil fuels – there will be a serious crunch in the next 30 years with the amount of material and energy human civilisation uses. You might find that physical media becomes much more sustainable than using cloud computing all the time.”
With digital, there is always the opportunity for scale, but how efficient is that scale? Houllahan points to Netflix’s DVD home delivery incarnation in the days before streaming, which is said to have offered 70,000 titles at its height. The streaming service now has roughly 17,000 titles across its catalogue.
Physical material is, by definition, more sustainable, although that’s not always a good thing. Take plastic, for example, which is sustained in the environment for generations. Mechanical equipment can be made to last for a long time, while digital equipment – and all the materials and minerals that go into its production – has a very short shelf life.
Houllahan points to a screening of Dune he attended recently where an optical block from the theatre’s digital projector had burned out. “How old was that projector?” he asks. “Maybe five or eight years at most. A 35mm projector can last 100 years. Making film prints is one thing, but making several digital projects is more complicated. An abundance of technology’s infrastructure is much more routinely replaced – and I don’t know if any of that can be recycled.”
Cinelab is powered by a 250kW solar array on the roof, and equipment is becoming increasingly efficient. Most of the power consumption in the lab is used for heating, primarily for getting the chemistry to proper temperatures. In addition, Houllahan is installing a power monitoring system to learn exactly where the main power draws are.
The chemistry of film has also become less toxic over the years – the principal chemical waste product being silver, which is reclaimed through electrolysis and then sold back into the silver market.
The discipline of silver
Creativity needs boundaries in order to thrive. Give someone infinite time and resources and they’re not likely to produce as much quality as someone with a set subject, budget and time limit. The illusion that the digital world has no footprint removes creative boundaries and inevitably leads to a massively higher shooting ratio than film does.
Shooting on film brings discipline. When the camera is rolling, frames are being exposed; you are actually rolling through physical material. On a tentpole film, the cost of film stock may not be the highest priority, but the psychological focus that comes with shooting film means less waste. Capturing digitally, particularly when planning is poor, can mean ‘keep the camera rolling and we’ll figure it out in post’. It’s always easy to do just one more take. Shooting film may lead to more focus, better use of time and more thrift all around.
Shooting digitally also means generating data – and where there is data, there is power consumption. “Shooting ARRIRAW on an ALEXA LF or ALEXA 65, you’re generating a massive amount of data,” Houllahan explains. “It all has to go someplace, and that’s hard drives or other kinds of data storage. The best long-term storage medium right now is LTO tape, but eventually, you’re still going to have to migrate that data. A big show could generate a petabyte of data – that’s hundreds of LTO tapes.”
Film as a final storage medium does avoid the struggle of having to keep your archive copy upgraded to be compatible with storage technology. The underlying technology of a film print of 1895 is identical to that of a film print today – and if somehow all the film projectors in the world vanished, it wouldn’t take long for engineers to rebuild a projector from scratch. The major studios are well aware of this archival longevity. Even when a film’s workflow is entirely digital, some studios will make a final master recorded to film to ensure preservation. A well-packaged film print in the right conditions can be locked away for a century and still be viable. “Everyone wants a simple answer, but there’s a lot of nuance and complexity,” adds Houllahan.
Golden Labs
Chris Lane started working in film labs when he was 16, and has stayed with it throughout the medium’s ups and downs. Now head of Cinetech UK, he continues building facilities, labs and designing equipment to support them. He’s seeing a big uptick in business.
“In the past, I’d never had an eye on sustainability. But when your client wants something, you make it as fast, efficient and low-cost as possible,” he begins. “Much of that is operating costs as well, including regenerating chemicals rather than simply throwing them away.”
But Lane has just embarked on a project to help build a new film lab in Paris and is listening to concerns about chemical effluent that didn’t exist ten years ago. EU environmental regulations – and France has sometimes been a leader in implementing them – mean these environmental improvements are no longer optional. The Paris client wants to outfit their lab with brand-new kit from top to bottom to support an already-existing rental and post-production business. Until now, they have been relying on a venerable French lab which continues to use decades-old equipment. With a rekindled interest in film, is there an opportunity to reboot film capture and processing sustainably?
Cinetech’s latest product is a film-cleaning machine designed to replace older tech left over from before the film downturn of a decade ago. Those older machines used a lot of energy as well as highly toxic perchloroethylene (aka tetrachloroethylene). Manufacture of the chemical was phased out under the Montreal Protocol, which banned ozone-depleting substances. But the machines continued to stay in use, reusing the chemicals cycled through the system. Perchloroethylene was finally abandoned and replaced by a new chemical cleaner from 3M, called hydrofluoroethers (HFE).
“The 3M chemical isn’t ozone-depleting or a greenhouse gas, but they locked the licence, so you had to buy it through them,” says Lane. “It didn’t clean very well and evaporated horrendously, plus it was horrendously expensive.”
3M – recently in the news about hiding the toxicity of its wide-reaching chemical products – discontinued its HFE film cleaner a couple of years ago. The alternative cleaner Lane provides is a widely available petroleum-based solvent, Isopar G.
The sales of the new machines have exceeded Lane’s expectations, but being a small, agile company and doing much of the engineering design himself, he can respond to market needs rapidly – and there certainly is a rising demand.
“You can’t get spares for the machines out there on the market now,” continues Lane. “The chemicals they use have been banned, and manufacturers won’t make it any more since it causes neurological damage. If you have a film lab – and there are many of them out there – each individual machine is vital for the whole food chain. There are businesses out there which stop for want of a $2 part they can’t find.”
In a world where it’s ordinary to throw away a server over five years old, a business which uses the same gear decade after decade seems like something out of a fantasy novel. But in the pre-digital age, the raison d’être of many mechanical engineers was to create something which could both last a lifetime and be easy to repair.
Keep Super 8 super
The world of film manufacture and development is small. Kodak is still the dominant producer of film stock, supplying both still and motion picture. Productions have few alternatives if they are seeking more sustainable options.
The surge in shooting on film has also meant increased use of 8mm and 16mm stocks. Back in 1965, Kodak introduced the Super 8 format, replacing standard 8mm with a different perf configuration and larger frame size. The Super 8 format was preloaded into plastic cartridges, saving consumers from having to load the tiny 8mm film stock manually and thus saving many family holidays from paternal fits of rage.
After shooting, Super 8 cartridges are sent to the lab and a spool of developed film is returned. The plastic cartridges are disposed. To this day, the disposable plastic cartridge is the method of Super 8 film delivery. Kodak has shown no signs of upgrading to a recycling scheme or creating a reusable cartridge. Someone still has to throw a sizeable chunk of black plastic in the bin for every three minutes of footage they capture – unchanged since 1965.
Fortunately, there are industry technologists experimenting with better methods. Edmund Ward, managing director at north London lab Analogue Image – aka On8mil – specialises in resale, processing and scanning of all film formats. He’s dedicated to restoring and improving Super 8 technology too, including refurbishing Super 8 cameras and remanufacturing parts.
Ward has also been trying to build a reloadable Super 8 cartridge. By buying Super 8 stock in bulk, cartridges could be loaded and issued to Super 8 rental clients, who would return them to the lab when exposed. Whether Kodak would be willing to sell Super 8 film in bulk is another issue, but it’s a no-brainer in terms of sustainability.
What’s it made of?
One thing that’s hard to get around sustainability-wise is that film is made of animals. Gelatin, made from boiling down the ligaments, skin and bones of livestock, is necessary in the creation of film negative, and alternative chemistries have not yet yielded better results.
There may be better, non-animal-product solutions available, but so far there hasn’t been a push to find them. Raising cattle has a huge environmental impact – in land and water use – plus substantial methane emissions (methane is 28x more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas). So, if film is to continue, it’s got to cut out the beef.
This feature was first published in the July 2024 issue of Definition.
