No doubt Arris and even Bolexes will keep whirring for decades to come, and some incarnation of Kodak will offer color neg, and someone else will put it in the soup and scan it for digital edit... but the harsh reality is that for much of the world, the SAG / AFTRA issue eerily timed with digital's maturity and global economic realities has dealt a paralyzing if not imminently fatal blow to film.
Labs have closed and absorbed, negative cutters are history, even telecine is waning by lack of demand.
The economic realities of trading emulsion for data files cannot possibly be ignored, and anyone who denies this probably works as a romantic hobbyist / artist filmmaker or an A-list studio DP. The in-between work is pretty much all digital now and has been for several years. In my little world, film fall right off the cliff in 2007...
...and that's a shame, because the discipline taught to film shooters is not continuing into the digital age. I hear this from other departments... something was lost with the end of film on sets. The precious magic and expense and mystery of a can of chemical that must be stored in total darkness... and the trust in the DP and lab that the dailies would knock your socks off... that's gone forever. The shortened learning curve to good image- making that comes with digital often costs the disciplines of protocol and technique that must first be learned and mastered before they are skillfully and intentionally broken.
I think there will be a rebound from this decade of everyman as imagemaker, and some will inject a new quality into the medium however they are used.
Fact is, there are entire working, professional crews right now who have never even seen a film camera in person, let alone on set... and could not care less.
Royce Dudley
Cinematographer
Southern California
http://www.vimeo.com/halepark
