In July of this year, Kodak Italy held a three day cinematography workshop in Rome for industry professionals. As in-house cinematographer for Kodak, I was the instructor for the workshop. The immense pre-production for the event was handled by Giovanna Rimoldi and Riccardo Di Tizio from Kodak Italy. Invited to the workshop were cinematographers, directors, and producers currently working in Rome. Also, two film students joined the workshop to work as crew for the grip and lighting needs. The group was a comfortable size of nine participants which allowed them several opportunities to shoot and direct portions of a short story. Although many of the attendees were more familiar with video and digital formats than film, everyone has aspired to shoot on film. Generally speaking, participants have always appreciated the Kodak workshops because they offer a stress-free opportunity to experience shooting with 35mm film.

The workshop was held at the Casa Del Cinema situated in the idyllic Villa Borghese which is the largest public park in Rome. All of the shooting took place at the Casa del Cinema and a café situated within the building. Although the temperatures climbed to over 90 F every day, the enthusiasm of the group was not diminished. One goal of the workshop was to give the participants an opportunity to shoot 35mm film in a 2-perf format. Interestingly, the 2-perf Techniscope 2.40:1 format was introduced by Technicolor Italia in 1963 as a low cost alternative to the CinemaScope 4-perf system. Techniscope was popularized by the “Spaghetti Western” genre and, most notably, the Italian director, Sergio Leone, and his Clint Eastwood “Dollar” series of films. In a PowerPoint lecture on the first day of the workshop, the features of the 2-perf format were discussed.  Some of the benefits mentioned were longer shooting times per magazine, reduced costs of the format, new finer grain V3 stocks which improve the look of the smaller format, and digital intermediate which has made 2-perf format more viable than the optical process of the past. As the group was soon to discover, 2-perf 35mm retains many of the inherent qualities of the larger 4-perf origination format.

After being in Kodak’s motion picture business for 30 years, you might think that a person would tire of doing the same thing. But what I have learned in those 30 years is that every project that I get a chance to work on is new and exciting! In 2009 we took on a local film project: a feature film called “AFTER,” written by a local woman, Sabrina Gennarino, who also filmed her project here in Rochester.

Although Rochester is the home of Eastman Kodak and the George Eastman House – and can claim many of the world’s greatest imaging innovations – features production here is moderate.  That’s why we were very excited to be able to support this production, not only with great product and technical advice, but also with postproduction services.

Aleksander Bach

Aleksander Bach is an award-winning commercial director based in Cologne, Germany. The son of a photographer, Bach was born in Poland and moved to Germany with his parents as a boy. He studied audio/video engineering and piano at the Institute for Music and Media in Düsseldorf, and completed his education in the graduate program at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Bach has won two consecutive Young Director Awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, in 2008 and 2009, and a Gold Award at the 2009 New York Festival. The 2009 winner at Cannes was a black-and-white documentary-style spot for the Red Cross titled “Stars,” which was photographed by Peter Matjasko on 35 mm film. Bach’s resume also includes inventive music videos and a music documentary. Here, he opines about the state of international commercial filmmaking:

A lot is changing in European commercial production. That’s partly due to the worldwide economic crisis, but the underlying structure of how the business works is also completely changing. In the classic model, a director in the commercial industry is represented by a production company. Lately, I have clients and agencies contacting me directly. They call and ask whether I am interested in writing a story. If I say yes, they brief me about the commercial. The lines of communication are getting shorter, because it’s more efficient. That’s necessary since at the moment, budgets are shrinking. For me as a director, that’s great. I have the chance not only to direct my interpretation of a storyboard, but sometimes I’m also able to write the spots myself, either with the agency or directly with the client.

As a follow-on to last week’s film formats for TV post, I would like to take a broader view of what people are shooting in the feature film arena these days:

Let’s start with 65mm color negative. The big, recent example of 65mm use is on The Dark Knight. It’s not an entirely 65mm production. The 65mm was cut into a number of 35mm shots, like the Bank Heist and the Batmobile chase scenes. 65mm was chosen to do this because it simplyis the best. In the opening sequences of The Dark Knight you can just see the quality that 65mm brings to the screen.

In recent months, there has been a perception that there has been a massive shift to digital, and that’s not true. In the US and Canada, between all the major networks (including HBO and the other channels) we have about 40 shows on film. 24 is still on film, and there was a thought that the original CSI: Las Vegas was going to go digital, but as they got going with the series, digital just didn’t work out for their needs. So CSI: Las Vegas is still shooting film.

At the moment, one hour dramas on US TV are still very much 3-perf 35mm. Castle; Grey’s Anatomy; Private Practice; Desperate Housewives; Brothers & Sisters; Lost; The Mentalist; Fringe; Mad Men; and Two and a Half Men are all returning shows shot on 3-perf 35mm. HBO is shooting loads of 35mm 3-perf at the moment. New series shot on the same format include: ; Hung; Boardwalk Empire; How to Make it in America; Wonderful Maladies; Treme; and others.