film cameras, stock, and processing and printing
technologies. This can only mean that the race to
determine which technology will dominate movie
production—film or digital—has not yet been won.
Film versus Digital Technology
Before we proceed, let’s summarize the strengths
and weaknesses of both technologies. Film stock is
a physical thing; digital is virtual representation.
Film stock runs through a mechanical device and is
subjected to a chemical reaction when light from
the lens strikes silver-nitrate crystals (or whatever)
on the stock, which must be kept locked away from
light and must be processed by a lab and edited on
a work print (which allows the editor to see only one
version of any scene or sequence at any one time).
Digital takes that same light from the lens and
processes it through a sensor chip into pixels, which
were traditionally put on various types of tape but
increasingly are now recorded directly onto a flash
card (much like the USB devices you use to move
files between computers) or directly onto a com-
puter hard drive. It doesn’t have to go through a
laboratory for processing and can be manipulated
with complete freedom on the computer. Editors
can adjust colors, clean up glitches or mistakes,
and make an infinite number of versions of any cut,
sequence, or scene for comparative purposes. Prac-
tically speaking, it’s like the difference between
writing a paper with a typewriter and writing it
with a computer’s word-processing program.
What is the current state of digital production,
distribution, and exhibition of films? So far, Holly-
wood has used digital systems to produce less than
1 percent of the movies released (excluding ani-
mated features), including George Lucas’s Star
Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999),
Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004), and David
Fincher’s Zodiac(2007). What’s in play here is not
just the studios’ reluctance to pay the costs of buy-
ing new equipment and installing new facilities or
modifying existing ones—studios can rent digital
or analog cameras for about the same price—but
also opposition from the filmmakers, distributors,
and exhibitors. Some directors—including James
Cameron, David Fincher, George Lucas, David
Lynch, Robert Rodriguez, and Lars von Trier—
have claimed that celluloid film is dead and that
future filmmaking will be an all-digital medium. Yet
many others prefer film technology, at least in the
production stage. They will insist on retaining that
option, even though the movies they produce on
film will most likely be transferred to digital media
for exhibition. Several directors—including Tim
Burton, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver
Stone, and Quentin Tarantino—have said that they
will continue to shoot on film. They are dedicated
to film’s particular aesthetic: its film grain, its
depth of color and shadow, even its imperfections.
Andrew Stanton, the director of WALL-E(2008),
revealed that Pixar, the studio that produced it,
uses sophisticated software to put defects into
their high-tech digital images: barrel distortion
(lenses make things bend), shallow depth of field
(limited image depth in focus), lens flares (light
reflecting inside the lens mechanism), and film
grain. How ironic it is that digital technicians are
now going to such trouble to re-create imperfec-
tions that camera technicians have worked so long
and hard to minimize or eliminate.
On the other hand, virtually 100 percent of all fea-
ture films are digitally edited, showing that all film-
makers are convinced by the efficiency and flexibility
of the available editing technology. That’s under-
standable, considering that digital-editing suites
are reasonably priced. In distribution and exhibi-
tion (getting the movie to the theaters and up on the
screens), there has been measurable progress in
converting theaters (far less than the 100 percent
editing figure but more than the 1 percent produc-
tion figure). As you might expect, the key factors
are economic. The major obstacle is the cost of con-
verting a theater’s projection and sound systems,
estimated at anywhere from $75,000 to $150,000 or
more per screen (remember that a single multiplex
can have 12 or more screens, and the projector for
each would need converting). As of late 2012,
30,000 of the nation's 40,000 screens had been con-
verted to digital projection, leaving the remainder,
mostly small town or seasonal theaters, as they are
or in some stage of transition.
However, a recent development indicates that the
industry is making major progress in speeding up490 CHAPTER 11 FILMMAKING TECHNOLOGIES AND PRODUCTION SYSTEMS