Sundance Film Festival: London opens today with a stirring selection of features, shorts and UK premieres, directed by exceptional international talent.
The festival gets its name from founder Robert Redford’s most famous film, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. The film’s Oscar-winning cinematography owes much to the soft-focused, rich-hued aesthetic of 35mm film and photochemical processing. Interestingly, it was shot in 1969 – just as a breakthrough in rival digital photography was happening with the development of CCD light sensors. The light sensor captured the image and made it unnecessary to have analogue film in the camera. Has the introduction of digital technology enhanced or harmed filmmaking since 1969? With festivals now teeming with film submissions like never before because of the accessibility of cheap digital cameras and mobile phones, we examine the development of movie-making technology since the 1969 release of the Butch Cassidy movie. And things have certainly moved on! By 2015, the Sundance Film Festival would be accepting films shot on iPhones for the first time!
1970s Considering Kodak was most adversely impacted by the digital revolution, it’s fateful that in 1975 they developed the world’s first digital still camera. Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson slung together a prototype which made use of the pioneering Fairman CCD electronic sensors available at the time, but the camera was a weighty, bulky thing. It successfully captured black and white footage onto digital cassette tapes but Kodak saw no future in it and did not fund further development. At this time, the celluloid world had no reason to fear the slow and stuttering emergence of its new digital competitor – not with the likes of All The President’s Men, starring Sundance founder Robert Redford, hitting the screens a year later, captured in glorious Eastman color negative 5254 and shot with Panavision’s industry-leading Panaflex camera.
All The President’s Men (1976)
1980s
The 1980s saw significant leaps in home filmmaking technology, and the ushering in of digital alternatives. In 1983, the first consumer camcorder hit the market. Sony’s analogue Betamovie BMC-100 recorded onto video cassette but did not have a playback button! VHS produced a rival camera which used even bigger cassettes, so quite a size. Two years later, Panasonic’s NV-M1 VHS camcorder capitalised on this new technology and its marked improvements drew a larger market share. Again, the chunky unit only recorded onto the sizeable video cassettes of the day.
Panasonic’s NV-M1 VHS camcorder
The heady pace of innovation was such that by 1986, Sony had developed the Sony D1 System, widely recognised as the world’s first digital system. Broadacst quality analog cameras recorded digital video signals onto D1 digital tapes, so it was very much a clunky hybrid. However, it was manufactured for industry professionals and studio use only – so was not a portable unit. It could be more accurately described as a recording system and not a camera. Moreover, the uncompressed data took up a considerable amount of space on reel-to-reel digital tape. Tape had obvious limitations.
1990s: Digital 1995 was a stellar year for pioneering digital filmmaking technology, with the arrival of the Ricoh RDC-1, the first digital camera to record video with sound. This digital still camera was arguably, the world’s first consumer digital video recorder. JVC’s GR-DV1, released that same year, also laid claim to being the first all-digital consumer camera. However, the MiniDV model, left both in the dust, setting in motion the MiniDV revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Digital versus Film
But still, no digital film classic on our screens to unseat the market dominance of celluloid standards such as Heat (1995) and Titanic (1997). Filmmaking upstart Thomas Vintenberg shot The Idiots (1998) on the Sony VX-1000 digital camcorder and fellow Dogme 95 director Lars von Trier shot Festen (1998) on the tiny Sony DCR-PC3 Handycam (Mini-DV). Both were received with critical acclaim but still essentially ripples on the cinematic wave – albeit, quite significant ones. These were the first digital films admitted to the Cannes Film Festival.
In 1999, Star Wars creator George Lucas popularised the digital format, shooting Attack of the Clones entirely on digital using the groundbreaking Sony CineAlta HDW-F900 developed by Lucasfilm, Sony and Panavision. A real challenge to celluloid opened up as the camera was proclaimed the world’s first digital cinema camera. In 2006, David Lynch shot Inland Empire in digital and said it was unlikely he would return to film.
Attack of the Clones (2002) – shot entirely on digital using the Sony CineAlta HDW-F900
Regardeless, celluloid stalwarts such as Quentin Tarantino continued to champion ‘real film’. Unswayed by the industry uptake of the new digital projection standard, he shot The Hateful Eight in 65mm and insisted his movie would embark on a roadshow of cinemas housing the required 70mm projection facilities. Now that’s what you call a celluloid champion!
2000s: SD Cards, the Big Ks & mobile phones
Does anyone remember Digital 8? Yet another hybrid digital and tape format that hung around until Sony’s first tapeless digital camera in 2003. The Sony XDCAM was priced for professionals but Sony execs saw a market for the consumer budget and produced cheaper versions. The likes of Panasonic followed suit – the Panasonic AG HVX200 recorded crisp high definition onto memory cards. The availability of smaller SD cards sped up the smartphone camera revolution. Tangerine, a film about transgender prostitutes, shot on an iPhone, premiered at Sundance in 2015 – the first iPhone film to be admitted to the festival. Do we sense the celluloid apple cart beginning to wobble? Not really.
Tangerine – shot on iPhone 5S, premiered at Sundance Film Festival (2015)
‘Film’ remained the preferred industry medium – resolutely so. And in the consumer, home-filmmaking and indie digital worlds, movie-making went from teccy digital filmmakers chasing swanky 2k, 4k, and 8k digital camera updates to mobile phone users recording 8k without a sweat and wondering what all the fuss was about. Samsung’s S20, released in 2022 captured 8K at 24fps. Yes, a phone! Whatever next!
Sundance Film Festival: London 2023 6-9 July, Picturehouse Central
