Scott S. Pelzel

Sorry Andrew, I agree with a few people here with regards to your article. You are being the elitist. I came up shooting film and I am happy with the new digital technology, but your points are only valid in that you are trying to compare apples to oranges. Two completely different mediums, physical and electronic. To say film is dead is only justifying your elitism and maybe its because you were never able to shoot motion picture film to actually understand it. Beyond your inability to see past the legitimacy of film as a capture medium still, you also forgot a very important factor. Archiving. Film negative is STILL the best form of an archival medium. I shutter to think what will happen to all the digital files even 20 years from now. To have such a staunch stand against film as still a viable medium does not make you forward thinking, it makes you closed off to a wonderful tool for capturing images that in of itself has very beautiful aesthetic qualities. I have just recently shot a project on 35mm and I was very glad I was able to choose that path over digital capture for a host of reasons too far too go into here. Sadly, what I find with young Cinematographers who come from learning only digital is the majority become more tech or gear head obsessed than focusing on aesthetics of images. This is not true of all young Cinematographers, but a great vast majority I encounter now. It's great to know your tools, but you also have to learn to know them, take that knowledge and put it aside to focus on what is more important and that is the visual image. Back in the days of shooting film, all the professional film cameras were built like tanks and able to withstand a great amount of extremes and wear and tear on productions, ironically, the things that would fail most on the film cameras were always the electronic elements which were gradually added over time to accommodate various new technologies, all the actual mechanical mechanisms in film cameras can last decades and have in may models. I wish the same could be said for digital cinema cameras, but it's not the case and never will be, the shelf life of an average affordable digital cinema camera started out to be 3 years before new models came along to replace them, now it's become more like a year and a half. I can now go rent or even buy a 30 year old motion picture film camera, laid it with film, put some nice glass on it and shoot with that and that camera will still function fantastically. Try the say the same about even a 10 year old digital video camera now, the formats keep changing and very few people shoot with the original digital formats from even 10 years ago. My point is film is a standard that has existed for a century and still retains pretty much those same standards with many improvements along the way. So, I guess what I am saying is stop film bashing and put your time into something more productive because it doesn't make you look very intelligent to post something like this and I like your site, but this article you wrote is really useless in the scheme of things.