Film is dead, and good riddance

Good riddance to a good thing. A wonderful, constrained, beautiful, treacherous and artistic frenemy, I’ll miss you but I’m glad you’re gone.

If that seems a bit schizophrenic, it is. Celluloid will always hold a place in my heart, probably yours too. It is special – the magic of those chemicals and silver halide, the whirling mechanical watch-like precision that moves with the regularity of a heartbeat. But even so, good riddance.

Everyone from a studio mogul to a couch critic will wax poetic about Film. Here’s why we should stop wringing our hands, ditch the rose-colored glasses, and get on with it.

First, we can get the look. With the near VFX level grading and secondaries used in most projects today, along with GPU powered looks and effects readily available on every platform, there is no film look that cannot be recreated in the digital world – better even, because we can cherry-pick just the features we want. For the doubters out there, let me remind you of two things: 1) if we can make CG worlds and tear them apart, I think we can manage a bit of noise, and 2) film artifacts are not rocket science; they are predictable and measurable, so they can be emulated accurately.

Take the audio example. The professional audio world has done a great job at dealing with computers during the creation process (though we both sucked at the delivery transition). They have created highly accurate models of analog gear, with or without the limitations of noise and hiss. They can do this because they’ve acknowledged the end of a pre-computer era. Have we?

And despite all that we hear in the nostalgic stories and mythology surrounding Film, it was certainly no saint. In fact, it was largely responsible for maintaining a kind of stranglehold on the art form, and it had its henchmen.

Post-Production greats like Deluxe, Technicolor and Fotokem loved Film. They were it’s biggest cohorts and defenders, and they still miss it deeply. Why? Because it made them so much money that they are still spending it today. A closed process with exotic chemicals and a highly inelastic demand curve meant they could charge whatever they wanted, and they did. Film kept the ivory tower high and it kept out the riffraff with their wild ideas. If you wanted to make a motion picture during Film’s big era, you had to bow down to the elite. The fact was, and is, that Film was the perfect way to keep ‘different’ out of Hollywood and maintain the status quo. How many runaway indy hits, made for little to nothing, by passionate, brilliant young filmmakers were there in the heyday of Film? Very few. Today, that lightning strikes with regularity. Hollywood has opened up to anyone with a good story and a very modest budget.

Technology hates Sunday drivers

The writing on the wall first appeared in 1989 when a new piece of software was launched on the Macintosh II. It was called AVID Media Composer and, while not the first non-linear editor (NLE), it quickly became the dominant solution. It was clumsy, but technology doesn’t mind clumsy and it rewards effort and risk. Over the next ten years or so Photoshop, After Effects and Shake joined the scene and newbies like Maya, Nuke and others bundled in. The biggest beneficiaries were Special Visual Effects. Their complex jobs often relied on accurate repetition and so became immeasurably easier with computers.