Inside the com­pa­ny trans­fer­ring dig­i­tal film onto 35mm

Many ded­i­cat­ed cinephiles will tell you that noth­ing com­pares to the thrill of watch­ing a film pro­ject­ed from 35mm. From the flick­er and grain to the occa­sion­al mishaps involv­ing a pro­jec­tor jam, the ana­logue film expe­ri­ence has been some­thing of a dying art thanks to the advent of dig­i­tal, which began in the mid-noughties and has con­tin­ued at a rapid pace ever since.

Nowa­days most cin­e­mas do with­out a pro­jec­tor, or indeed a pro­jec­tion­ist, as the ris­ing cost and fid­dly nature of main­tain­ing a print pres­ence have become unsus­tain­able. Yet plen­ty of film­mak­ers such as Christo­pher Nolan, Quentin Taran­ti­no and the Safdie broth­ers still ardent­ly shoot their projects on phys­i­cal stock, and the for­mat has seen a revival sim­i­lar to the vinyl boom, with fans flock­ing to new and reper­to­ry 35 and 70mm screen­ings around the world. Despite the down­turn, there’s an unde­ni­able mar­ket for celluloid.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the process of cre­at­ing prints from orig­i­nal neg­a­tives (or even ship­ping exist­ing prints around the world) is a cost­ly one – but one small com­pa­ny has an inno­v­a­tive solu­tion. Nes­tled rough­ly 40 miles away from the hus­tle and bus­tle of Lon­don on a qui­et indus­tri­al estate in Ayles­ford, Kent, CPC Lon­don is a small team with big ambi­tions and some incred­i­ble tech­nol­o­gy at their fingertips.

Estab­lished in 2014 by Chris Lane, CPC Lon­don are the only lab in the world that sole­ly spe­cialis­es in dig­i­tal-to-35mm print­ing, and their agili­ty when it comes to time­frames puts them at a real advan­tage in the unpre­dictable world of film. Using two extreme­ly rare film recorder units, they are able to trans­form raw data into a brand new 35mm print, com­plete with sound­track and sub­ti­tles as required (even in 3D).

For a 90-minute film, the process from receiv­ing the raw data file to com­plet­ing print­ing can take as lit­tle as four hours – a mas­sive reduc­tion on the time it takes to devel­op a new print from a neg­a­tive. It’s not just about the lucra­tive turn­around time though; Lane says that pro­duc­ing a 35mm print in this man­ner also reduces the cost by up to 90 per cent. ​“We keep our mar­gins very tight as we are com­mit­ted to get­ting 35mm back in cin­e­mas,” he explains.

Amid the dig­i­tal monop­oly, there are a hand­ful of cin­e­mas for whom print is still the pre­ferred way of show­ing titles, par­tic­u­lar­ly com­mu­ni­ty-run and inde­pen­dent screens. The exor­bi­tant cost of rent­ing prints from archives (par­tic­u­lar­ly those abroad) is often severe­ly lim­it­ing, but in the­o­ry, the low­er cost and quick turn­around offered by CPC Lon­don opens up new opportunities.

In 2018 the com­pa­ny pro­vid­ed the print for the Venice Film Fes­ti­val pre­mière of Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, and print­ed Mark Jenkin’s Cor­nish smash hit Bait at their lab. The Safdie Broth­ers are repeat cus­tomers, hav­ing ordered nine 35mm prints of Uncut Gems, which played in the­atres across the Unit­ed States as well as at the Prince Charles Cin­e­ma in London.

The trans­fer process is fair­ly straight for­ward. Take the recent­ly-pro­duced prints of Uncut Gems as an exam­ple: the film was shot by Dar­ius Khond­ji on 35mm film, scanned to cre­ate a dig­i­tal inter­me­di­ate, and then print­ed back on to pos­i­tive 35mm film for dig­i­tal pro­jec­tion. One of these prints showed in a spe­cial engage­ment at Quentin Tarantino’s New Bev­er­ly Cin­e­ma in Los Ange­les, where every film pro­grammed plays from a print, be it 35, 70 or 16mm.

In Lon­don, the Prince Charles has week­ly print screen­ings, rang­ing from Hitch­cock to Nico­las Roeg. See­ing a title on film not only enables audi­ences to see it as the direc­tor intend­ed, but as Lane explains, there’s a cos­met­ic upside too: ​“Print film has an inher­ent grain struc­ture due to its organ­ic com­po­si­tion, and that recre­ates images in a way that the human eye is more used to seeing.”

There’s also a tac­tile qual­i­ty to film prints: every scratch and flick­er is an indi­ca­tion of the amount of craft that has gone into bring­ing a sto­ry to the screen. Their organ­ic com­po­si­tion ren­ders 35mm prints as a liv­ing thing, prone to degra­da­tion over time. You can see his­to­ry when you’re watch­ing a print on-screen, and vis­it­ing the CPC Lon­don lab real­ly high­light­ed this, as we saw fresh­ly-print­ed film zoom from the dark­room through large baths of devel­op­ment chem­i­cals, before dry­ing off and spool­ing into com­plet­ed reels. These are then checked by tech­ni­cians using trusty Steen­beck flatbed edi­tors for any pic­ture and audio defects, before being pack­aged into can­is­ters ready for dispatch.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing and strange­ly sat­is­fy­ing process to behold in an age where so many titles are avail­able at our fin­ger­tips with lit­tle to no evi­dence of the time, mon­ey and resources invest­ed in their pro­duc­tion. But CPC Lon­don is keen to cel­e­brate the artistry of film, while chang­ing per­cep­tions of it as an expen­sive, out­dat­ed for­mat. Beyond print-as-pres­tige, CPC London’s work opens the for­mat up to film­mak­ers work­ing on tight bud­gets who might oth­er­wise be lim­it­ed to digital.

Of course, the big chal­lenge now is bring­ing 35mm back to more the­atres, who have large­ly done away with ana­logue equip­ment. But for film enthu­si­asts both behind the cam­era and in the audi­ence, the future looks promis­ing, and CPC Lon­don are hap­py to be lead­ing the way.