Getting Kodak To Bring A Film Back From The Dead: Kodak Ektachrome
INTRODUCTION
It’s 2013. The digital camera has been introduced and you can now capture images with the click of a button. It soars in popularity while film sales plummet.
In a move to cut costs Kodak begins discontinuing its more niche films. Finally, all the variants of the legendary Kodak Ektachrome for both stills and motion picture got the chop. Cut to 2017.
“Kodak is proud to announce the return of announce the return of one of the most iconic film stocks of all time: Kodak Ektachrome.”
Now that the much beloved Kodak Ektachrome is back on the market, let’s take a closer look at how exactly the film was resurrected, break down what makes Ektachrome different to other existing Kodak films, and look at a film industry use case by going over why Ektachrome was used to shoot the second season of one of the most popular contemporary TV shows.
HOW EKTACHROME WAS RESURRECTED
Kodak started ceasing manufacturing Ektachrome 64T and Ektachrome 100 Plus in 2009. This was quickly followed by the rest of the line up until 2013 when all Ektachrome products were scrapped.
After seeing a bit of an uptick in the sales of film - especially in photography - Kodak made the move to bring the emulsion back. However it was no easy task. Manufacturing film on an industrial scale requires significant investment.
You can think of making a filmstock as being kind of like baking a cake. First you need to assemble all of the ingredients.
This is where Kodak hit the first snag. Because it had been discontinued from the market, it was difficult to find suppliers that would supply them with the necessary ingredients - or chemicals - to make it.
Ektachrome is a complex film that requires about 80 different chemical components. Eventually they managed to source or manufacture all the necessary ingredients and could begin producing and testing the new film.
This starts with using a cellulose triacetate base - a plasticy substance - which is then coated with multiple different layers of chemicals. These chemicals are mixed in different containers in the dark and applied to the support roll until it is coated. It is then cooled, dried and is ready for shooting where it will be exposed to light for the first time.
Initially Kodak rolled out the film so that it could be shot in 35mm by still photographers, in Super 8mm cartridges and in 16mm. However, 35mm motion picture Ektachrome wasn’t made available. Well, not yet anyway. But we’ll come to that later.
Once the Ektachrome film has been shot it can then be developed in an E-6 chemical process where the image emerges and is set so that it can be viewed and worked with under light.
This development process starts by passing the film through a chemical bath in the same way as colour negative film is in C-41 processing. But, because it is a reversal or slide film, it also has an extra step with a reversal developer that turns it into a positive.
But, you may wonder, what exactly is reversal film?
WHAT IS EKTACHROME
In a previous video I went over Kodak’s Vision 3 colour negative film, the most popular stock for motion pictures. When this film is shot and then developed it produces a negative where the colours and areas of highlights and shadows are inverted. This negative is scanned and then digitally converted to a positive image so that the image is flipped back to normal.
Kodak Ektachrome works differently. It’s a reversal film which is different to a negative film.
This means that when it is shot and developed in the E-6 process that I mentioned before it produces a positive image on the film. So the image can immediately be viewed by just projecting light through it and when it is scanned you get a positive image without needing to do any conversions.
If this is the case then why is negative film more commonly used than reversal film?
One reason is because reversal films have a much tinier dynamic range than negative stocks do. A modern colour negative stock like Kodak’s Vision 3 range is capable of capturing detail in an image with up to around 14 stops of dynamic range between the deepest shadow and the brightest highlight.
So it can see details in extremely dark shadowy areas metered at f/ 1.4 without going to pure black, while also maintaining details in super bright areas of the image up to f/ 180 without blowing out to pure white.
Ektachrome on the other hand has a far smaller dynamic range of about 4 or 5 stops. So if it is set to capture details in shadows at f/1.4, the highlights will start to blow out at only f/ 5.6.
This means that cinematographers need to be far more careful with exposure and that scenes need to be lit much flatter, with a small difference between the bright and dark parts of an image.
If you compare the sensitometric curves of Kodak 500T, a colour negative film, and Ektachrome, it shows that detail can be captured in far more stops of light for colour negative than for the reversal film.
Ok, enough technical talk. What kind of look does Ektachrome produce?
Firstly it is a high grain stock, so it has more texture and therefore less perceived resolution than Vision 3 stocks. I’d describe Ektachrome colour as ‘hyper real’. It basically captures colour with far greater vibrance, richness, contrast and saturation than real life. The shadows have a lot of blue in them and the blacks are very dense.
The highlights are quick to blow out to white but have a filmic roll off to them which is pleasing to the eye.
In a nutshell, reversal films are much more grainy, punchy, contrasty, vibrant and saturated than negative films - which makes the look more extreme and elevated.
These, along with its limited exposure range and slow speed of 100 ISO, make it more of a niche film, hence it’s prior discontinuation, however if you want that punchy, exaggerated colour then Ektachrome is hard to beat.
USE CASE
“In the second season we use Ektachrome, which I’m pretty excited about. We asked Kodak to manufacture 35mm Ektachrome which was I think discontinued in 2003 or something. And now they’re doing it again and it’s exciting. Sometimes we’re shooting, like, night exteriors on this stock which is a 100 ISO stock. It’s a little bit of a nightmare but when you get it back it’s rewarding.” - Marcell Rév, Cinematographer
Because of its niche usage, Ektachrome was only being manufactured for the smaller gauge Super 8mm and 16mm formats, as well as in 35mm for small still photography rolls.
The Euphoria creative team pushed to use the stock to capture large portions of season two of the show. After talking to Kodak and putting in a large order they were able to get them to manufacture Ektachrome 100D in 400 foot 35mm motion picture rolls.
There were two main reasons that they pushed to shoot on film. One, they originally wanted to shoot the entire show on film. And two, the switch from digital to film creatively reflected the visual evolution of the characters and the show through a desire to break out of realism and a move into presenting it in a larger than life way that echoed how the characters saw themselves as the star of their own movie.
The elevated colour, contrast and grain of Ektachrome was the perfect choice for this emotional expression of a more sensory experience.
“To be honest we always wanted to shoot it on film - the first season too. We were just not really allowed to. We’re changing a little bit of visual direction and I think film was a choice for season two.” - Marcell Rév, Cinematographer
After the success of the first season, HBO relented to their creative demands and allowed them to capture the second season photochemically.
Instead of processing the film with the recommended E-6 process that would render the film as a positive, Marcell Rév instead got the lab to cross process the reversal film so that it came back as a negative instead of a positive.
Deliberately messing with its intended processing meant that the colours were even more saturated and contrasty and that the negative came back with a green tint to it once it was scanned.
He then got his colourist Tom Poole at Company 3 to do very specific colour correction that removed the green tint, but maintained the strange, over saturated colour.
For some darker night scenes where he needed a more sensitive stock he also used Vision 3 500T negative film. He underexposed it and pushed it a stop to try and increase the grain and then got his colourist to grade it to closer match the Ektachrome footage. The reversal and negative footage didn’t exactly match, but they at least occupied a similar visual world.
The biggest challenge that he had to face by using two different film stocks was that they required two vastly different approaches to lighting. Due to the different dynamic ranges of the two films, that I mentioned earlier, the negative film could be lit with far more contrasty lighting conditions, while any scenes shot with Ektachrome had to be shot with lighting that was much flatter, with lots more fill light, in order to create a similar look.
They also required vastly different amounts of light. Getting exposure at 500 ISO needs far less light than getting exposure at 100 ISO.
So any night or interior scenes shot on Ektachrome meant that increased power generation and higher output light sources were required.
All of this work resulted in images which had strange colour casts, were grainy, amped up, saturated and pretty magical.