The Pursuit of Perfection

It never ends

The Pursuit of Perfection

“Nothing endures but change.”

From Lives of the Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertius

(Note: this is yet another dragged from the archives of BS&T that didn’t make the cut. A fresh post will appear here — inshallah — next week on the first Sunday of the month, as usual.)

In the summer of 1970 — prehistoric times for many of you — I had a chance to wander through the Smithsonian Institution in our nation's capitol. A few weeks from turning twenty, I was nearing the halfway point on a summer-long tour of the country via motorcycle (my own personal homage to Easy Rider), following a meandering path from the San Francisco Bay Area through Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, across Kansas and Oklahoma, down through New Orleans to the tip of Florida, and on up the eastern seaboard. After exploring Washington D.C., I planned to ride north to Maine, then take the Trans Canadian Highway all the way to Vancouver before turning left and heading for home.

That's pretty much how it worked out, with a few adventures in between.

But first came the Smithsonian and its many thousands of fascinating exhibits, most of which I’ve forgotten by now. A few stuck in my brain, though, and continue to resonate today, including a huge gleaming red and chrome piston-driven aircraft engine designed and built by Rolls Royce to power civilian airliners in the 1950s. This magnificent creation represented the sum of a legendary manufacturer’s skill and engineering experience distilled into a sixteen-cylinder turbocharged engine designed to deliver a massive quantity of reliable power. As the ultimate refinement of the piston-powered aircraft engine, it was a product of the pursuit of perfection, and to a certain extent, represented perfection achieved … but what should have been a moment of crowning glory turned to ashes with the introduction of the Boeing 707, which instantly rendered piston-engine airliners obsolete. Much faster, quieter, and more reliable, jet airliners turned the travel industry on its head, and in the process, relegated that beautiful Rolls Royce engine to the history books.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago while working on an episodic crime drama called Criminal Minds. After filming exteriors all morning, we moved inside to shoot the interiors with two cameras. Once the set was lit, we stood by our lamps to make any final adjustments, then began to crank out the coverage. That’s when it hit me what was strange about all this: we were actually shooting film, with a complete Panavision package. Nearly every show I’ve worked on for the past couple of years has used digital cameras, which meant I hadn’t even seen a film camera up close for quite a while. I watched the familiar rituals as if for the first time: the 2nd camera assistant running in with a case of freshly reloaded 1000 foot magazines and handing them off in return for the exposed mags. While the two 1st assistants mounted the fresh mags and threaded film through the sprockets, the 2nd A.C. was breaking down the exposed mags and shoving them back into empty cases to be downloaded in the darkroom and sent to the lab.

A reload is all business for the camera assistants, but the rest of the crew gets a few minutes to relax and slip outside for a cigarette or phone call. The actors get a chance to regroup while the director thinks about the next scene. This comfortable routine has been the rule since long before I started my industry career — it's all part of what comes with shooting film.

Panavision and Arriflex cameras are miraculous devices, having been refined over the past eighty years to a point approaching technological perfection. In the hands of a skilled DP and operator, there isn’t much a modern film camera can’t do when it comes to delivering the most sumptuously gorgeous images — but just as this level of near-perfection was achieved, along came the digital revolution to jerk the rug out from under the Way Things Are.

It’s deja vu all over again.

Such is the price of progress. Personally, I don’t much care for the new digital cameras. Where film cameras are all precision-machined metal, gears, and glass, digital cameras look to be made of plastic and wires, like cheap props from some crappy Roger Corman movie. Instead of the well-choreographed dance of the film reload after every ten minutes of shooting, digital cameras hold something like 45 minutes on a chip, which means much less reloading — and when the time finally does come to re-load, it’s a simple matter of swapping the full chip for an empty one. What used to take several minutes can now be done in seconds. I’m sure the producers think this is progress, but as an aging curmudgeon with a bent for yelling at clouds, I don’t. Besides, every digital camera I’ve seen trails an inch-thick cable all the way back to the digi-tech tent, further cluttering up the set while offering ample opportunity for the rest of us to slip, trip, and fall.

Hey, I’m a juicer –- it’s my job to lay cables right where everybody else will trip on them!

As I watched the well-practiced ballet of the camera re-load that day, it occurred to me to look close, because I won’t be seeing it much longer. Film is on the way out, fading into the past as digital takes over. This isn’t the first big change I’ve seen, and it probably won’t be the last — I used an upright Moviola editing machine to make a documentary in college, an awkward, clattering machine that soon gave way to fast, quiet flatbeds, which in turn vanished when digital editing came of age. The old DC carbon arcs in common use when I first started were supplanted by an ever-evolving flow of modern HMI lamps, which may in turn be phased out if LED lighting — or some other energy-saving technology — can do the same job more efficiently.

I don't know that digital looks quite as good on the big screen as the best of film yet, but in time it will — or the aesthetics of viewer will evolve to accept the crystal-clear look of digital as the New Normal. Visual quality was never the selling point for digital in the first place: the film vs digital argument was lost the moment economics tipped in favor of computer technology. In one form or another, digital is here to stay.

I'm told that “Criminal Minds” will come back next season, but with digital cameras instead of film. In the relentless pursuit of perfection — or something like it — the only constant is change.

Same as it ever was.