star wars shift from film to digital techniques

Foreign films, subtitled or dubbed, also had to find theater space to recoup their investment, creating an informal chain of art house theaters not only in the United States, but also around the world. Thus, exploitation films from American International Pictures shot in 6 days on budgets of $100,000 or less competed on the same playing field with Hollywood blockbusters from the major studios. When all movies were shot, edited, and screened in 35mm, theatrical presentation was a necessity, and every film, no matter how high or low the budget, had to open in a theater to make its money back.

Needless to say, there was much lost in the shift to digital, which was the most momentous retooling of the cinematic apparatus since the invention of the medium itself. Movies in the 21 st century became available on laptops, cellphones, as streaming video replaced conventional distribution patterns. Movies were now everywhere, all the time, endlessly and effortlessly available. Films were no longer located in one place only – movie theatres – then shown much later on television, cut to ribbons and interspersed with commercials. Where before the end product of a feature film was a 35mm print, a poster, a trailer, some lobby cards and the usual press junket for journalists, now films were shot and edited entirely using digital technology, and the theatrical experience began to fall away.

Everything about the business changed seemingly overnight. With incredible rapidity, 35mm production and projection became obsolete, as did film itself, forcing Eastman Kodak into bankruptcy (from which they have since emerged) – something unthinkable only a decade earlier. To understand what the last ten years of cinema have been about, one has to start at the turn of the last century – the year 2000 – when Hollywood decided that it was time to get rid of film itself, and make the shift entirely to digital.

Star wars shift from film to digital techniques