February 2026

The State of Shooting on Film — Part I

For the first 100 years of filmmaking, almost every image that appeared on a film screen was etched with light on celluloid strips coated with a photochemical emulsion. Hollywood’s adoption of digital cinema cameras in the early 2000s completed the paradigm shift that started with television. Now, the majority of films being produced are electronically captured. For all of the truly marvelous gains of this advancement — new sensors, new techniques, new workflows, new ideas — filmmakers have feared there is something essential to their art that will be lost as labs shutter, film stock producers cease production, and existing film cameras break down, all of which contribute to analog film's new status as the exception, rather than the rule....more