Fujifilm is Selling Off One of its Major Film Factories in Europe

Looks like the real bad news was 9 years ago when it shut down. This might be an opportunity for a Ferrania-type situation, fingers crossed.
 
9 years unmaintained and probably shut down in a hurry, most of the equipment will probably go for scrap unfortunately.

Mart
 
One of the blogs I follow is The Art of Adventure Photography, by Bruce Percy. Something went wrong with the feed last July, and I've only just realised and sorted it out, so I've had many back posts to read. One of them was about new film and old production facilities (in part). He says:

As part of my current thoughts about how we're all changing as photographers, I decided to look into the viability of film remaining with us in the future. It seems that my ideas about film becoming end-of-life were unwarranted. Despite a small resurgence in it, I had believed until now that film manufacture could not continue to be a profitable exercise as time goes on. It seems I am partly right and also partly wrong about this.

Many existing film manufacturing sites are optimised for large-scale production. Apparently retooling them to produce smaller production runs is not a viable option for some of the large film manufacturers, and from what I understand, because of the chemical processes involved, would also require a redesign in the films so they could be optimised for smaller scale production runs. I don't see how some of the big film manufacturers are going to be interested in investing the time and money in developing and retooling. It's just not a viable thing for them to do.

But there has been an increase in new films coming out from small companies. From reading into this, it appears that it's much easier to optimise a small-scale production facility from scratch rather than trying to down-scale, so in this respect, I think if film is to continue to be around for the future, it is going to be in the form of small scale production and that means new films released by new start up businesses rather than the films we know and love now.

This is perhaps no bad thing, because film technology still has a lot of potential for further development and it may mean we see more exciting films coming out.
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I thought that was an interesting comment, in the light of the CineStillFilm and FilmFerrania developments. Downscaling has always been an issue for businesses...
 
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wow i would love a tour, i used to work in IT for a company that did a lot of plant and automation like that.
9 years switched off most of the relays and switches would be iffy.

nice tho.
 
ChrisR said:
I thought that was an interesting comment, in the light of the CineStillFilm and FilmFerrania developments. Downscaling has always been an issue for businesses...
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That would apply to Film Ferrania, but not CineStillFilm, as they're just repackaging Kodak's motion picture stocks. Unfortunately, I'm not really convinced that CineStillFilm is helping very much, as they're just taking sales away from still photography film.
 
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skysh4rk said:
That would apply to Film Ferrania, but not CineStillFilm, as they're just repackaging Kodak's motion picture stocks. Unfortunately, I'm not really convinced that CineStillFilm is helping very much, as they're just taking sales away from still photography film.
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It's more than just a simple repackaging operation though and for me they are bringing something worthwhile to the market which is not necessarily taking away sales from traditional still film. I will try it sometime this year but it will just be an extra roll to try and not replace something else.
 
RaglanSurf said:
It's more than just a simple repackaging operation though and for me they are bringing something worthwhile to the market which is not necessarily taking away sales from traditional still film. I will try it sometime this year but it will just be an extra roll to try and not replace something else.
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I appreciate that the undertaking is more complex than very simple repackaging due to issues such as remjet removal, but it's still Kodak motion picture film at heart. Also, they must be selling quite a bit of it, otherwise they wouldn't be bothering with this complicated process, which suggests to me that it is taking sales away from traditional still film.

The choice of having the CineStillFilm is nice, but are we really helping ourselves in the long run? I fear the future ramifications of continuing to purchase motion picture film rather than traditional still film.
 
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