Shooting a film in 35mm. The trick to doing it cheap.

I have to admit, I have more of a “tech geek” in me than I like at times. This whole thing got started when I bought a Russian 35mm camera from a guy in NY that couldn’t get it to work for a music video he was trying to shoot. I already had some 16mm gear and I thought, “for $500 I can shoot 35mm film?  —go for it!” I still don’t have it running. It did, however, lead me down a dim path to the Soviet film gear from the ‘80s. So between my  tech geek side and curiosity about the former Soviet Empire, the project lurched forward. Eventually it was clear that the only way I was going to get everything I wanted was to turn it into a business, and Indi35 was born.

It seems like a simple idea. Buy the gear, send the pieces around the world to get the modifications done and voila! a business is running and we’re making money! Not so simple, of course. The actual project has taken about two years, and a bigger investment than I originally anticipated (duh!), but Indi35 is now open for business. The objective is to make 35mm film production more affordable than ever before, and with some planning it is simply amazing how inexpensively it can be done. I recently loaned my 2 perf (Techniscope) Kinor to a fellow 2 perf owner and DoP whose rig fried its electronics. He was shooting a 60 minute featurette with a director friend of his. The cost of film, processing and HiDef telecine (5:1 shooting ratio) came to $7000. No I didn’t mistype- $7k. You couldn’t shoot Super 8 for that kind of money. I believe the entire budget for the film was under 20k, it’s the sort of thing anyone can do with a belief in a project, a lot of drive and a couple of credit cards.

I have read so much lately about how film is dead, RED is the uber digital acquisition tool, HiDef video cameras make images as good as film, etc., etc. No doubt there is great new digital gear these days that can make wonderful images. But any way you slice it, 35mm film is the standard to which all of these new formats are compared. So why not use the real thing if it’s right for the project?

The mantra is this: plan your epic in 35mm (in anamorphic ‘scope [2.35:1], Techniscope 2 perf [2.35:1], or flat [1.33:1- 1.85:1], buy short ends (I’ll tell you where), process and telecine where the deals are (again, I’ll tell you where), and…rent my gear! Or someone else’s. The point is, you can do it. Make your film.