DEV, STOP, FIX… ENJOY!

By Ron Prince

On the face of it, Slough isn’t exactly a filmmaker’s paradise. The butt of many a joke, and made famous for its mundanity by the BBC comedy series, The Office, the town has the highest concentration of UK HQs of global companies outside London. Blackberry, McAfee, Burger King, DHL, Telefonica and Lego all have offices here. On the outskirts, Slough Trading Estate is the largest industrial zone in single private ownership in Europe, with over 400 businesses providing 17,000 jobs. Mars Bars have been made nearby in their countless millions for over 70 years.

Tucked away along Banbury Avenue, Cinelab Film & Digital has what you might consider an unprepossessing exterior, but you should never judge a book by its cover. For inside, behind secure doors, lies a treasure trove of talent and technology, a veritable hive of industry, dedicated to filmmaking, with a reputation for excellence and innovation stretching far and wide.

The business started out ten years ago, as a photochemical lab, but has since added an array of DI colour, on-set DIT and digital dailies services to its portfolio. Today you will find a tantalising mix of analogue paraphernalia – dark rooms, film winders, photochemical baths and film print machines – set cheekby-jowl with the most sophisticated 21st century widgets –like film scanners that go up to 12K and perfectly colourcalibrated offline-editing/grading suites.

Photochemically, the company has earned its stripes variously processing 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and 65mm film for many leading cinematographers – blockbusters such as Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi (2017, DP Steve Yedlin ASC), Mission Impossible: Fall Out (2018, DP Rob Hardy BSC ASC), Wonder Woman 1984 (2020, DP Matthew Jenkins ASC) and No Time To Die (2021, DP Linus Sandgren FSF ASC), alongside smaller-budget features including The Lost City Of Z (2016, DP Darius Khondji AFC ASC), Phantom Thread (2017, DP Paul Thomas Anderson), The Mercy (2018, DP Éric Gaultier AFC), Censor (2021, DP Annika Summerson BSC), The Worst Person In The World (2012, DP Kasper Tuxen DFF), LOLA (2023, DP Oona Menges) and Sick Of Myself (2023, DP Benjamin Loeb).

TV series shot-on-film have also passed through the dev, fix, stop baths, including Small Axe (2020, DP Shabier Kirchner) and Succession S1-4 (various DPs), plus commercials and music videos too numerous to mention.

Segueing more recently into the on-set world of digital dailies and dailies colour, the team has serviced productions such as The Banshees Of Inisherin (2022, DP Ben Davis BSC), The Son (2022 DP Ben Smithard BSC) and Slow Horses (2022, DP Danny Cohen BSC). Last year, it also launched a DFD (digital-film-digital) service, whereby digital movie files are shot to celluloid film, which is then processed and scanned back to digital, to deliver an authentic film look on the source material – The Wonder (DP Ari Wegner ACS ASC) being a prime example.

real uphill struggle persuading agencies and production companies to consider shooting on film. They almost laughed at the thought!

“Other photochemical film labs, like Technicolor and Deluxe, were shutting their doors right, left and centre, and old-fashioned celluloid film appeared a distinctly old-fashioned way of doing things. But, I have always believed in film as an artistic medium and despite the odds of an almost certain extinction, I believed analogue filmmaking would rebound.”

Indeed it did. Powerful, big box-office directors led the charge. Christopher Nolan, who used film on Interstellar (2014, DP Hoyte Van Hoytema NSC FSF ASC), J.J. Abrams, who then shot Star Wars: Episode VII (2015, Dan Mindel BSC ASC) on celluloid, plus Quentin Tarantino and Judd Apatow, were among a group passionate film supporters that stepped-up to urge Hollywood to keep film alive.

It’s a generally pretty rosy picture for the business, but it wasn’t always that way. Rewind to 2013 when Cinelab first set-up shop after acquiring Bucks Film Labs, and you will find the world of celluloid production and print distribution was in a very sorry state. On the one hand digital cinematography had taken a Svengali-like hold over producers, and the increasing adoption of digital projection by cinema chains, after the success of movies like Avatar 3D (2009), meant the traditional cash cow of bulk film prints for distribution was under serious threat.

Faced with a shrunken market and dwindling sales, Fujifilm stopped production of its motion picture film products, and Kodak voluntarily filed for bankruptcy in the US. The very real fear was that film – an artistic medium for over 100 years – would simply curl up and die.

“Everyday, over the first two or three years, I questioned my sanity about opening this company,” admits CEO Adrian Bull, when asked to reflect on what motivated him launch a film lab. “In the beginning, it was

In 2015, 18 months after it emerged from bankruptcy protection, Kodak reached pacts with Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, NBC Universal and Warner Bros. for them to purchase undisclosed amounts of film that would be enough to extend Kodak’s film manufacturing business. It meant Kodak could continue to make camera negative, intermediate stock for postproduction, as well as archival and print films. It also meant Cinelab had a chance too.

By 2019, Cinelab had processed six million feet of film and, after bouncing back from the Covid-19 lockdown, handled over 4.5million feet in 2022.

“Although I still think I was crazy to have taken such a gamble at film’s lowest ebb, I am really proud of what we have achieved as a close-knit team who champion celluloid for an ever-growing list of people who want to shoot and project on film,” he says. “One thing is for sure, the appeal of film is not going away anytime soon.”

At this point, Bull has to head off to meet representatives from a large streaming company, who are investigating the DFD process and making film prints for the theatrical release of high-profile productions, both past and up-and-coming. So film laboratory manager, Andy Hudson, does the honours and shows me round the facility.

Hudson has been at Cinelab for ten years, having previously learnt about negative development from the ground-up over many a long year in the labs at Technicolor and iDailies. He oversees all photochemical and film laboratory services.

Film processing conforms to the rigorous specifications of Kodak ECN-2 Kit Chemistry, to provide optimum results, either straight, push and pull-processed, on Daylight/Tungsten filmstocks, and with the least environmental impact possible. Silver is reclaimed from the process and upcycled into luxury jewellery by designers Claire Richardson and Natalie Daniels From The Silver Screen, as seen at the 2023 BSC Expo.

The two Photomec film processing machines, like the 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and 65mm filmstocks they variously handle, are breath-taking examples of human invention and mechanical ingenuity. So too is the Bell + Howell Model C film print-making machine, with its prisms and RGB printer-light capabilities.

For anyone, including me, who has ever developed film themselves, and for those who have not yet, there’s something truly-captivating about handling film and wondrously-magical in how the image appears from the exposed negative. In this day and age, where digital number-crunching takes place on faceless computers, the physical connection of real people to the nuts and bolts that built the movie industry for over a century, is spine-tingling. Andy Hudson and his team are wizards.

We meander round corridors and rooms stacked with film canisters, and into the film-scanning

DI/dailies grading theatre, where he’s reviewing final colour using DaVinci Resolve on the 35mmoriginated Håndtering Av Udøde (Handling

The Undead ) (DP Pål Ulvik Rokseth), set for release later in the year. He joined in 2021, having started out in the film lab at Todd-AO, before honing his in skills in colour over 25 years at Company 3, Pinewood Studios and Harbor.

With the idea of offering end-to-end services, from preproduction to dailies deliverables to remote grading, all under one roof, Cinelab expanded its services in March 2021 by joining forces with digital imaging/dailies firm On Set Tech, bringing Joshua Callis-Smith and Simon Chubbock into the fold as CTO and COO respectively. The two companies had already collaborated closely for several years, on features such as Rocketman (2019, DP George Richmond BSC), and since this merger they have worked The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain (2021, DP Erik Wilson BSC), The King’s Man (2021, DP Ben Davis BSC) and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2021, George Richmond BSC), as well as those mentioned above.

All-of-a-sudden, Bull is back in the room – one of the expertly-colour-calibrated grading rooms – fresh from what would appear to have been a successful meeting about DFD and striking 35mm film prints, and is keen to pick-up from where he left off earlier.

“Along with its unique aesthetic look, one of the things that has helped film to survive and prosper as a creative medium, is that technical infrastructures, colourmanaged pipelines and workflows have evolved considerably over the last few years. Film isn’t oldfashioned at all,” he says.

“Turnaround times can be just as fast, if not faster, than commensurate digital workflows from capture to dailies to post production. And, a huge bonus is that 16mm/35mm projects can take advantage of highquality 2K or 4K scan-once workflows, followed by secure, electronic delivery of dailies and edit-ready files to anywhere worldwide.

“As I hope you have seen on your tour, we have collective strength-in-depth, to add value to productions making great content, whether they are originating on film or digital formats, on high-end motion pictures, episodic productions, commercials or music videos. Slough’s not all that bad, is it?” department, where Paul Dean, head of scanning and dailies colour, has all manner of HD, 4K and 12K devices under his command for 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 15perf originated productions, along with back-to-film recorders. Dean also joined the company a decade ago, bringing with him vast experience from Todd-AO, Metrocolour and Soho Images. He has the implicit trust of DPs and directors to oversee and grade their dailies whilst they concentrate on-set.

I have to say, I enjoyed every minute of my visit to Cinelab Film & Digital, and didn’t want it to end. If you get the opportunity for a visit too, take it. It really is a filmmaker’s paradise.

The company’s head of colour, Darren Rae kindly lets us spend a few moments in the company’s 20-seat