HOW IT WORKS
REEL OR NOT
Our How Guy Directs His Audience on How Movies are Pictured on the Silver Screen, By Jim Collins
SOME OF THE NEWS out of Hollywood these days sounds like a re-run. The next Big Thing, according to the captains of the industry, will be an upgrade from film to digital cinema. Filmmakers saw that new frontier years ago, though not many have been pushing to reach it. Not only has the upgrade not come to a theater near you, but it isn’t coming any time soon. So the reports you might have heard on the death of film maybe exaggerated. More likely, the reports are premature. Movies will almost certainly go the way of photography and magazine printing, to name two other arenas where early concerns about quality and cost finally faded in the face of the digital revolution. The news about digital cinema isn’t if, but when. Consider this month’s column a current retrospective, a flicker of twenty-first-century light on a decades-old technology, a celebration of film while film still means something.

ODE TO CELLULOID Most of today’s movies (short for moving pictures) are films, literally. They’re shot on 35-millimeter-wide ribbons of transparent celluloid that you’d typically find in your 35-mm single-lens reflex camera, except that the film is shot vertically and there are only four perforations per frame, not eight. (Film for TV is primarily 16 mm, and for home movies, 8 mm. Several special movies—for example, IMAX films—are shot on 70 mm.) By rapidly exposing light onto the light-sensitive silver compounds suspended in the film’s gelatin emulsion, a movie camera captures a series of still images, creating a negative that is the raw footage for the movie. In post-production, editors cut up the film, reassemble it, and splice it back together with glue. Final prints are made from that completed negative.

Movies have been made this way for more than a century. In 1891, the concept for this technology originated with Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope. Edison’s invention—a motor revolving a strip of film with slightly differing frames in front of a light source—relied on a quirky ability in humans called “persistence of vision.” The human brain retains impressions for about a tenth of a second after the source of light has been removed from the eye. As Edison realized, if a series of images could be reassembled within less than one-tenth of a second, the eye would be unaware of the sequential process—persistence of vision would fill in the holes to make a complete moving image. If more than ten complete images per second were reassembled, viewers would perceive smooth, continuous motion. The image is assembled, unconsciously and automatically, by the brain.

Advances in the technology improved the projection of the film and the film itself. By the late 1920s, sound recordings on disc were cued to synchronize with the moving images on the screen. The first color movies debuted in the 1930s. In the 1950s, sound and picture were finally combined on film, the sound in the form of magnetic strips along the sprocket holes at the film’s edges. (Projectors had playback heads, like those on tape recorders, to produce the sound.) In the past couple of decades, surround-sound signals (directed to three front-speaker channels, two surround channels, and a bass subwoofer) and digital soundtracks have been both synced on CDs and built into a magnetic strip on the film’s surface (as a backup).

Over the decades, filmmakers have come up with tools to manipulate the final print. Sepia-toned filters on camera lenses during filming give the images a nostalgic, old-time feel. Post-production editors over- or under-expose the film to soften or darken scenes. They can “color-correct” the negatives in the lab, pushing the film’s three primary colors (blue, green, red) so that the start of the chase scene shot on a bright Thursday morning would look the same as the end of that scene shot on an overcast Friday afternoon.

In 2000, directors Ethan and Joel Coen broke new ground by converting their entire live-action film O Brother, Where Art Thou? into digital files and manipulating the frames with computer technology (turning a lush, saturated, green Mississippi backdrop into a washed-out, monochromatic, dust-bowl brown). Using a laser-film recorder, they converted the digital files back into a film negative, which they printed and distributed in the traditional way, and earned an Academy Award nomination for best cinematography in the process. The computer’s ability to match colors and create special effects was awesome. It far outweighed the high cost and slight degradation of image quality that came with the conversion of the original film. Since the experiments by the Coen brothers, computer-enhanced post-production has become commonplace.

One of the problems with using actual film is the enormous amount that is needed to create a finished movie. A movie camera shoots 16 frames on every foot of film. A movie projector runs the film at 24 frames per second. Doing some simple math—one second of movie equals one-and-a-half feet of film—it’s easy to see how the numbers add up and costs escalate. Raw, unprocessed 35-mm film is about 50 cents per foot. A typical two-hour movie requires more than 170,000 frames and some 10,800 feet—more than two miles—of film (shot on several cameras). A completed print is usually shipped on six to eight reels in two cans and weighs close to 75 pounds. (That weight doesn’t include, of course, the multiple miles of ribbon left on the cutting-room floor.) Film is a hundred times more expensive than digital video. In the spring of 2002, George Lucas spent $16,000 on 220 hours of digital tape for his digitally recorded Star Wars installment, Attack of the Clones. A corresponding amount of traditional film would have cost Lucas $1.8 million.

GOING DIGITAL The finished prints eventually make their way to those small rooms in back of the theater where the projectors sit. Since the early 1900s, carbon-arc lamps have provided the brilliant illumination, the light beams through a fan-like shutter whirling 24 times per second. Each passing blade of the shutter blocks out light for the fraction of a second that the frames advance. The light projects the images onto the movie screen, which is typically made of heavy white vinyl and is usually covered with a reflective coating of some kind. The coatings are categorized by how much light they reflect, the most common being “pearlescent” and “silver”— thus the term “silver screen.” Recently, within the last decade, super-expensive, super-bright bulbs made from xenon gas have become the standard.

In the old days, a projectionist fed the film into two separate projectors, alternating reels—as one reel played out, another was started on the second projector. While the second reel was rolling, the projectionist removed the first reel and threaded on the third one, and so forth. In the 1960s, a huge, pizza-pan-shaped device called a platter automated the reel-changing process. A projectionist using a platter builds up all of the movie reels ahead of time, winding them onto a central core, attaching them with a special tape. Motor drives and a series of pulleys wind the film into a single projector, then rewind it on a second platter, ready to swap and use again as soon as the movie ends. The seemingly simple innovation, invisible to viewers, changed the movie-watching experience. With the platter, only one projector was needed to show a film, and one projectionist could easily run movies in several auditoriums at the same time. And so was born the multiplex and its modern offspring, the megaplex—and the big screen was no longer so big.

The debate between digital and film involves both quality and cost. Digital has already shown itself worthy at the movie-making level. And computers dominate post-production, now. On the quality side, critics say that no digital projection can yet match the color, warmth, and depth of pristine celluloid. However, as digital-projection techniques improve, the quality may begin to equal that of film. As for film, the “pristine” part is actually a problem. The celluloid degrades with every use. After a newly released film has been shown for a few weeks, it will contain hundreds of small scratches. The files containing a digital movie remain precisely the same, in all theaters, no matter how many times they’re shown. In that regard, a digital movie is to film as a CD is to cassette tape.

The cost side is more complicated. In production and distribution, digital is far cheaper than film. The process of making a final celluloid print, shipping all the reels to theaters, and then storing them after they’re returned is expensive. When film companies make prints widely available they put a lot of money at risk—the high risk is diminished with the homogenized and formulaic content that Hollywood is often criticized for. Light, romantic comedies with happy endings or violent, action flicks with good-versus-evil scripts are always safe bets. On the other hand, digital files cost almost nothing to ship. They can easily be burnt onto optical disks (which look just like CDs or DVDs) and mailed or transmitted via satellite or broadband to special servers inside theaters. Experts estimate that digital production, distribution, and storage could save the film industry a billion dollars a year.

CATCH 22 Digital cinema, however, is currently problematic for theater owners, as they are the ones who must buy the expensive projection equipment. A standard commercial film projector might cost $30,000 and last for 30 years. One digital projector can run as much as $150,000, or even more. (Consider that most megaplexes have ten or more theaters.) And currently there aren’t enough digital movies available for many theater owners to justify such an investment. In the meantime, moviegoers seem fully satisfied with the current state of the art. The change to digital isn’t being driven by consumers.

Of the 37,000 theaters in the United States, only 60 are digitally equipped. When George Lucas charged into the new frontier back in the spring of 2002 and made the industry’s first full-length, big-budget, live-action, totally digital movie, he screened it for critics at his private digital theater at Skywalker Ranch. Then he converted the digital file into old-fashioned celluloid film, so the rest of the world could see it.