One of my favourite articles in American Cinematographer

I love this movie, and I love reading about how it was shot. I thought I had posted this here before but I did a search and apparently I didn't.

A Sword in the Bed: Eyes Wide Shut - The American Society of Cinematographers

IMHO shooting film is just more interesting, no matter the project. YMMV.

Shot over two years between 1996 and 1998 I see.

That was then. This is now.

Hi, it's not a movie that I ever had an interest in seeing, but sort of an interesting article; thanks for the link.

I personally have quite a lot of process experience, although not in motion work (primarily in C-41). Something I discovered, in perhaps my first 6 or 8 years at that, was that the more "pure" photographers often had, shall we say "weak," understandings of the inner workings of things. Some of their beliefs were more akin to superstition than to reality, although most of the time I guess it doesn't really matter if they had little rituals that they went through. (If your favorite sports team seems to win more frequently when you wear your lucky white socks, what does it matter? It costs you nothing to do so, and doesn't hurt anything.)

Or if a pro photographer thinks that they need to pre-age their pro film to "stabilize" its aging process, doesn't hurt anything (the film more than likely isn't gonna "notice" ten or twenty times what they do to it, but the photog will probably feel better about it, and maybe even their customers feel lucky knowing that their photographer has special "insider tricks" working for them).

I smile when I read stuff like this:

Having said that, I think Deluxe did an incredibly consistent job day in and day out. They put aside a bath just for us, and they always put our stuff through first — that was a special privilege they extended to Stanley. It was a sevenday-a-week job to make sure that what we were getting was consistent, ...

A serious lab, at least back in the day, was more than likely gonna do what you wanted provided that you were willing to pay for it. Special privilege for Stanley? Sure, as long as no other customers suffer. You want that same privilege for your movie? Sure, you're paying for it anyway.

As long-time process control guy this part, "sevenday-a-week job to make sure that what we were getting was consistent,..." is especially laughable. It's not that big a deal (but you need people who know what they're doing). But "process control" really only goes on when you're processing; if your lab is closed on Sunday then there is no "process control" happening on Sunday.

Again, I haven't done motion picture processing, but worked with all the mainstream color neg/print processes from C-22 and EP-2/3, including developer regeneration. Of course, people will say, yeah, but you didn't do motion picture volume! Maybe not, let's see... it looks like "conventional" motion picture runs about a foot and a half of film per second, or 90 feet per minute. So a 90-minute film is about 8,100 feet of film, about a mile and a half. Comfortably less than we used to run daily where I worked; in fact, less than three hours of processing time on one of our cine machines. Of course, the movie-makers would shoot vastly more than that, maybe twenty times more? That'd be something like thirty miles of film! In our operation that would have been about two normal work weeks during a fairly busy time of year - about six hours per day on a cine processor running at 50 ft/min. Now I could be way off on my estimates, but it doesn't appear to me that a single motion picture would have been that big a deal to an actual motion picture lab.

Anyway, I think the filmmakers may have been reading more "magic" into the lab operations than there really was - not an unusual thing with non-lab people.

One thing that I DO wonder about a bit is how the film labs did the extended time (presumably) "forced processing" tests. (Cine machines are continuous, so if configured for certain process times then changing the machine speed changes ALL chemical times, including wash.) I would think that for production processing one would select a machine speed to give the desired development time, then reconfigure all of the other racks, bleach, fix, washes, etc., to give the appropriate times. So it seems like the lab would perhaps be dedicating a cine processor for Stanley's work for the duration of the shoot; I dunno. Maybe they have another workaround.

Anyway, I think the filmmakers may have been reading more "magic" into the lab operations than there really was - not an unusual thing with non-lab people.

All your points I think are valid. However, there is a little bit of good manners going on here, too, I think. It builds good will and reenforces positive energies between agent and client.

Bill C. raises a very good point about what happens to the rest of the process--increasing fixing time, etc.doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

I wouldn't know as I have only developed a few rolls of film in my life. That's a pretty advanced kind of problem. I found it interesting that the new stock (Vision) couldn't push as well as the old stock. But Vision3 is terrific in all areas, particularly 500T. Massive latitude, pushes really well, lovely colour.