Some of my fondest memories are from around the days when YouTube was created, when my cousins and I would make home movies together on a DV handicam. It recorded to little magnetic tape cassettes and through itself, it could transcribe them to the computer. We were really impressed by it, and it came while we were still kid enough for it to be used without much shame or hesitation. They existed in our households because our parents had bought them to record us, but in a way only matched by the computer, the camcorder became ours to record ourselves.
We made the silliest home videos with the loosest of storylines; interviews with a puppet, a satire of American Idol… When the office debuted, we assembled at my mom’s office on the weekend and covertly shot a remake of our favorite scenes from the pilot. Then skate videos caught our eye and we started recording ourselves mountain biking and skiing to set to music. We had all that fun on just 640x480 pixels!
That’s a 4:3 aspect ratio and although we definitely didn’t have that terminology then, at the time we could tell you how un-cinematic everything we shot seemed. We could edit in letterboxes across the footage and fake a shakey, handheld 16:9 but it never seemed right, and usually ended up cutting things off in ways we hadn’t planned for. It also made our already fuzzy image even smaller. While any aspect ratio can be adapted to any native format of video, some leave more to be desired than others.
The modern high definition formats all either conform to a wider 16:9 or a 3:2 aspect ratio, but classically many films were shot with a 4:3 aspect ratio. The similarities between classic filmmaking and standard def DV camcorders start and end there, though. No amount of labor or finesse could have elevated the tapes I made with my troupe of cousins to the lovely and still sometimes amateurish image making of a bolex, and yet their footage exists inside the same framelines.
Ironically now the 4:3 aspect ratio has made a resurgence on the artsier side of filmmaking. The popular opinion seems to be that the cinematic look of fifteen years ago, which used 2.35:1 widescreen and anamorphic lens effects, steadycams, etc has become achievable on a budget and thus ubiquitous in a way that it no longer feels cinematic. 4:3 is the classical broadcast aspect ratio for television, and was common in documentary filmmaking, which shared some of the same 16mm production regimes.
Unmodified 16mm cameras record this shape of frame because originally, 16mm stock was perforated on both sides. When the cellulose used in film improved a single sprocket did the trick, and the remaining space where the perforations had been was left to be exposed as a photo-sound track. Super16 is a near-16:9 aspect ratio format that is sometimes done by widening the film gate and re-centering the lens of a 16mm camera. The frame is the same height, but widened into the soundtrack margin. Sound is captured by separate means for these. There are also native Super16 cameras. Ultra16 is a less invasive modification made only to the film gate of 16mm cameras. Because these modifications are made without affecting the lens calibration or position, they can be done much more cheaply than for Super16.
Originally, in the 1920s, the 16mm format was sold as a consumer product advertised as both safer (non flammable) and cheaper than the existing 35mm film stocks. As that space was overtaken by smaller formats over the century, 16mm remained popular for some uses like documentaries and the news for a combination of image quality, stability, camera size and a variety of modern aspect ratios. It places film in a role where it can really shine: small enough to have inherent character in image (grain & unique depth of field), large enough to be vivid and clear, and yet still small enough to be economically shot. A lot of independent, experimental, and student films were shot on it between the 1960s and the 1990s.
video formats compared with the native resolution of 16mm film stock
However, by the time I had a chance to take classes in filmmaking in 2011, 16mm seemed to be on its way to extinction. Excitement had reached a critical mass around the new digital gear that was just over the horizon. Digital SLR cameras had just started to have video capabilities. Around that time I got a Canon 7D as an all purpose camera to document my work and with a limited sense of what was possible to do with digital video from a camera using SLR lenses. I used it a lot during the summer before college in a documentary mode, of my friends and I working at summer camp. I could only preview it because editing software was still almost as costly as a camera itself, but it looked surprisingly vivid and cinematic in Full HD, 1920x1080. With resolution measured in pixels becoming the dominant paradigm, it was only a matter of time before 16mm was surpassed and then qualified as obsolete. Film resolution maxes out at 160px/mm, meaning 16mm film records a roughly 2 megapixel image at 1650x1200 (4:3).
Still, at that time, it wasn’t just my professors nor my own opinion that analog filmmaking was an eccentricity. In 2010 Kodak discontinued a number of film stocks and it was really only available on ebay when I first sought it out. As industry use of 16mm film declined, and more and more documentaries, television series and independent films were shot digitally, the format was largely relegated to student films during the 2010s. In class we were shown a Bolex, and exposed 100’ of black and white film in groups of four or five, but it was almost emphasized as a novelty, as something we were lucky to get to experience as film students, to shoot a 20 second clip as your rites, but not necessarily a practical tool. Strangely, I think in the context of taking film classes at art school, the error of impracticality was not a deterrent.
After experiencing a live film set as a P.A. following my first year of college in 2011, I was so preoccupied with the professional equipment I saw that I looked up some of the best 16mm cameras, Aatons and Arriflexes. At the beginning of the 2010s, they could be had for like, a tenth of the going rate the decade prior. Seeing the price of these legendary aircraft-grade feats of engineering sometimes dip below the msrp of the new plastic digital cameras broke something in me.
I didn’t think globally enough to connect the fact that their price was because of the maddening drought of stock to record on. At that time it seemed the format had been phased out, more or less; but to me they were something that lay just out of reach. At the time, the impossible project had just bought a factory in the Netherlands but had not yet produced any film. I remember an early research rabbit hole on producing a lightproof box with rollers, inside which acetate could be perforated and coated in emulsion and wound into a tin for removal. There were a few photos of such a homebrew film-making machine on flickr, but to my dismay nothing like a blueprint could be found. Like I’ve said, the market for the equipment at the time pushed something beyond its limit inside me.
And, on checking back in on the space now almost 15 years later, it seems I wasn’t the only one… There’s an active user community worldwide responsible for a lot of homebrew engineering that all seems pretty reproducable, feasible and well documented. There are well designed tools for developing and scanning that have been fabricated and offered for sale by those in the community, too. After I mentioned to a friend in passing conversation how it had once been an interest, I was curious to see what the market for vintage equipment looks like nowadays, too. And, today: film’s cheap, cameras aren’t.
Today, those same aatons and arris demand around $20,000. And while film is cheaper, it isn’t exactly cheap when factoring the cost of development and scanning and the postal rates at each stage. A 100’ reel of 16mm can record at most nearly 3 minutes of footage. That will cost between $100-$150 after all is said and done, between 75¢ and $1/second. So, again I find myself in a situation that sort of breaks my brain. Film can be had for as little as $30/100’ but processing it makes it something that needs to be either tightly shot or tightly budgeted.
But…
Maybe it wouldn’t have to be if I could develop, dry and scan it myself. I have experience with black and white darkroom chemistry, and I quickly found the kind of development tanks and reels that could hold 100’ lengths of 16mm. The chemicals are simple and cheap, and there are ways to automate the agitation cycles. A drying cabinet with HEPA filters, positive air pressure and laminar flow could be made with very light-duty construction. Following down a rabbit hole, I learned about how a film projector could be run using a stepper motor controlled by a computer that also runs a small camera and LED lights to capture the film frame by frame as a series of small image files.
And there it was. Maybe it could be improved on as I went, maybe expanded to use more expensive and hazardous color chemistry in a cost effective way too, but for the time being, I could see an actually pretty reasonable breakdown of a system for controlling the costs to where I could go wild with the format, in black and white at least. One must become their own filmomat but the with advice and homebrew documentation from the community, this is achievable today. Other anachronistic passions like for instance wooden boat building have cultures that celebrate the absurd, ongoing labors that are entailed in doing it yourself. If the moving image is truly a relative of still photography, I feel confident there’s a pleasure in the every measure of the pain of getting off digital.
I might be alone in that view when it comes to it being a rationale for actually wanting to do things as manually as this, but there is a growing popular opinion that the last 15 years of digital advancement has not necessarily been predicated on the “creative destruction” of all that came before it. Film isn't a horse and digital isn’t a car, it’s maybe more like gas and electric. There are times when a digital format is called for because of various economies, and there are times when film is called for to achieve a filmic sense of moving images that simply cant be achieved any other way. At no point during the rise of digital cinema was 35mm production discontinued. This has always been the way that imaging formats have worked, and film and video today are just contemporary formats.
To stay with the idea of film being the “gas” format, let’s acknowledge a few parts of its nature. 16mm film debuted in 1923, at the same time as leaded gasoline. It was first marketed as safety film, because it replaced an earlier consumer celluloid film that was extremely flammable. Some 16mm cameras contain an oil dispersal system that keeps the internals lubricated. They need to be stripped and re-applied about every ten thousand feet of footage, or every 4 hours of film-time. ‘Footage’ is a real dimension, and the camera usually has an analog odometer to show how much runtime is left on the reel, and a speedometer to show when the motor is moving the film at the correct speed to match the audio recording. There’s an early-aerospace feeling when you hold a machine like this precisely whirring away, completing 24 distinct exposures, pulsing as such through the reflex and the viewfinder and moving about 7 inches of film through the gate, each second, nearly silently. It’s a combustion of light and time contained inside a machine.
Developing is similarly petrochemical, employing bleach, ammonia and borax as well as proprietary chemicals which strip out dye from the film while its being processed. As with automobiles, mechanical speed is a nimble commodity that finds its full substantiation in large unseen reservoirs of chemicals both yet to be used and exhausted. And of course the image itself lives forever on an acetate, although this is the one part of the process that’s archival, and not waste in itself, provided storage conditions don’t cause spontaneous combustion. All of this seems a little gluttonous for the creation of a short run of images, two and a half minutes, give or take. But, then it’s worth mentioning that most modern media is archived by being printed on film stock. Analog trounces digital in this respect, as once it begins decaying it does so steadily and slowly, as opposed to instantly and totally.
‘Invisible’ limitations of this sort, are brushed off as outside of the average use-case, or as an improperly extreme measure of an otherwise dynamic format. Like with a plug-in car, digital filmmaking appears to transcend the consumptive nature of its predecessors. You can lay on the “footage”, which is idiomatic, and capture long sequences in their entirety, limited only by the expansive sizes of storage media, then review everything in-camera instantly. Footage here refutes its origins in a similar way to how mileage does in cars; where originally the odometer measured the distance until the oil lubricating the engine was exhausted. The modern quotation describes how far an electric car can venture on a repeatable series of outings, wherein driving displaces battery charge temporarily. Electric cars don’t have engine oil to change, but they do have limits to the distance that their charges will power them. There’s a tension in a similar way to how footage is applied to both film stock and video files. The terminology meets at a point but diverges.
Digital AV technology itself subscribes to an incrementalism that is different than its filmic forebears, in spite of inhabiting the same name and similarly designed systems, digital and analog cameras are divergent technologies. In the 100 year history of small format filmmaking the improvement of the format involved widening the image exposure area without changing stocks and improving the constituent systems of the camera. Optimization of a set of limited constraints defined the medium. Digital camera technology, having ably replicated and automated the mechanical aspects of photography, and eliminated the problem of film movement, continues to improve the cybernetic capabilities of the sensor: its size, range of color, resolution, and light sensitivity. At each stage of development, new product families were produced in tandem, shaping the next moves for the industry in superficial ways, but never defying Moore’s law. In terms of electric driving, first and foremost you’re encouraged not to question a society and world that depends on and renders all public space and experience unto cars. The “problem” solved by these technologies is just that there was friction in constant and needless consumption. While further privileging driving speaks for itself, digital technology removing the limits of recording may seem benign or utilitarian, but it’s part of the economy that has situated both media and art as “content”.
Where improvements to analog photography and cinematography were axiomatic; like silent camera operation and a recordable soundtrack on film, enabling sound to be synchronized, the improvements made to digital cameras of all kinds are incremental. Last year it could do 10,000 iso, next year it will be 12,500. Except that’s how it was when I last checked in, and today its more like 100,000 to 125,000. The basic reflex to explore the medium through modular tools has taken flight into wild incrementalism, in which the art itself becomes confused with existing within the narrow band of technological capabilities of the very latest equipment. Reporting on the cutting edge of imaging technology, absent any artistic context whatsoever is a predominate form of influence peddling on youtube, with a level of production gloss that gives me a kind of wry-delight because it underscores the mutual confusion of social media creators, audiences and platforms about the distinctions of tool, form and art. These are essentially tautological infomercials in which owning the correct professional tool is positioned as being critical to participating in the artistic discussion, which is itself mostly avoided besides as a foil.
One is reminded of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, when the characters visit “the most photographed barn in the world”. One character opines on how once the visitors have seen the signs showing a photographed view of the barn, they become unable to see the structure actually standing in front of them. As the characters observe the tourists assembling at marked positions to take their own photos of the barn the characters remark on how they are part of a system for reproducing the views of the barn and, looking down a row of them, how each tourist can’t seem to see the others also training their cameras on the barn.
“The artistic discussion” evoked in this youtube content dwells on a sense of tools being “state of the art”, as a kind of arms race to supremacy. In subscribing to this view, which is fixated on the possibility of replicating the quality of the motion picture industry on a ‘prosumer’ video rig, the purpose of a camera and of moving images is so framed. Because the budgetary restraints are removed from shooting digitally, with only the best equipment you may be granted the aura of the professional producer. The aura imparts the sense that wherever you go and use this tool a well conceived product will result, somewhat magically, insofar as it will be a result of the achievable aura of the professional equipment. You will be standing in the right place to “see” the barn, as prescribed on the post cards of the barn for sale.
It’s easy to come across the products of this approach in the prosumer video space of youtube. Besides the “informercial” type, a common variety is the plotless cut of B-roll titled, tagged, and SEO’ed by the equipment used to shoot it with no other commentary. In spite of the absence of anything interesting in the production of the piece, it has a pre-emenince, a sort of cockiness in how it seems to flourish on video platforms. This kind of vague, unfinished content is presented as experimental, but if it was seriously critiqued as such I have to imagine there would be a pivot to situate it as something diagnostic, for internal use among other camera operators. This duality seems related to the prevailing aura I’ve been outlining, where the tool is self evidently the frame for a creative product. The digital camera is a perfectable, consumptive cyborg meant to stand in as a proxy of the author. The camera operator dispassionately adjusts their little pet-artist-machine, but only it sees.
What I see digital video as is a genuine and total improvement over its magnetic tape origins, that can be merged with analog production in interesting ways. But I am less keen to see the latest capabilities of digital recording as distinguishing it as a supreme form. They are just descriptive metadata to me— I take seriously the defensive tack, that the dry content I’ve been describing is just diagnostic material for prosumers. To me, the generative urgency of a limit is a better muse than that of limitless ability. If a worthy idea demanded that I record for many hours at a time, I’d feel glad for the latest video formats.
For most of my ideas, while at first blush the cost of continually buying and processing film might seem exorbitant, it presents a steady rate after the one-time cost of obtaining the recording equipment. The material concerns of accessing a high quality effect are modular and simple. The costs and concerns associated with digital filmmaking at a similar level are fractal-like. All of the parts, each with their own minutiae, will be steadily made obsolete in ways that film will simply remain unchanged. In five years, most of that digital equipment will record a product that is read as a deliberate aesthetic choice. It’s a strange state of affairs that reveals the true nature between the contemporary tech and the legacy formats, still in use by industry, popularly deemed “obsolete”. The aspect of digital tech being able to record infinitely is in tension with the short, insect-like lifespan of its hardware before it becomes obsolete.
The creative destruction of film was an overzealous narrative that after 20 years hindsight can perhaps be forgiven according to the purer optimism of the time about things simply improving without complication, and for taking for granted how capable and adequate the analog formats they already possessed truly were. It’s one of the ways that perspectives have shifted a lot in so short a time, that today so much cultural enthusiasm is focused on the past, however recent. I feel like I have seen the digital format of moving image come into its own from the days that it still relied on tapes as a kind of vestigial, film-like medium. I have lived to see the time when consumers can record at a resolution approaching IMAX film, while at the same time many of the latest innovations are sold on their ability to introduce loss and lower the fidelity of the image. Now long after the thresholds were crossed around 2008, things aren’t so simple as they seemed then.