Why “No Time to Die” and Other Productions Still Shoot on Film

After many delays, No Time to Die hit UK cinemas a month ago, and has already made half a billion dollars around the world. The 25th James Bond movie was shot on celluloid, making it part of a small group of productions that choose to keep using the traditional medium despite digital becoming the dominant acquisition format in 2013.

Skyfall made headlines the year before that when it became the first Bond film to shoot digitally, captured on the Arri Alexa by the legendary Roger Deakins. But when director Sam Mendes returned to helm the next instalment, 2015’s Spectre, he opted to shoot on 35mm. 

“With the Alexa, I missed the routine of film and the dailies,” Mendes told American Cinematographer. “Watching dailies on the big screen for the first time is kind of like Christmas. Film is difficult, it’s imprecise, but that’s also the glory of it. It had romance, a slight nostalgia… and that’s not inappropriate when dealing with a classic Bond movie.”

Early rumours suggested that Bond’s next outing, No Time to Die, would return to digital capture, but film won out again. Variety reported last year: “[Director Cary Joji] Fukunaga and cinematographer Linus Sandgren pushed to have No Time to Die shot on film instead of digital, believing it enhanced the look of the picture.”

Charlotte Bruus Christensen believed the same when she photographed the horror film A Quiet Place on 35mm. “Film captures the natural warmth, colour and beauty of the daylight,” she told British Cinematographer, “but it’s also wonderful in the dark, the way it renders the light on a face from a candle, before falling off into deep detailed blacks. It is quite simply beautiful and uniquely atmospheric.”

The Bond filmmakers went one step further, making No Time to Die the franchise’s first instalment to utilise IMAX 65mm (reportedly for action sequences only). In this respect they follow in the footsteps of film’s most passionate advocate, Christopher Nolan, who mixed 35mm and IMAX for The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar.

“I think IMAX is the best film format that was ever invented,” said the celebrated director in a DGA interview. “It’s the gold standard and what any other technology has to match up to, but none have, in my opinion.” For his most recent films, Dunkirk and Tenet, Nolan eschewed 35mm altogether, mixing IMAX with standard 65mm.

Nolan’s brother Jonathan brought the same passion for celluloid to his TV series Westworld. “Jonathan told me that he had already made up his mind about film,” said pilot DP Paul Cameron in an Indiewire interview. “We wanted the western town to feel classy and elegant… There’s something tactile and formidable [about film] that’s very real.”

Cameron and another of the show’s DPs, John Grillo, both felt that film worked perfectly for the timeless, minimalist look of the desert, but when the story moved to a futuristic city for its third season Grillo expected a corresponding switch in formats. “I thought we might go digital, shooting in 4K or 6K. But it never got past my own head. Jonathan would never go for it. So we stuck with film. We’re still telling the same story, we’re just in a different place.”

One series that did recently transition from film to digital is The Walking Dead. For nine and a half seasons the zombie thriller was shot on Super 16, a decision first made for the 2010 pilot after also testing a Red, a Panavision Genesis and 35mm. “When the images came back, everyone realised that Super 16 was the format that made everything look right,” reported DP David Boyd. “With the smaller gauge and the grain, suddenly the images seemed to derive from the graphic novel itself. Every image is a step removed from reality and a step deeper into cinema.”

“You really are in there with the characters,” added producer Gale Anne Hurd during a Producers Guild of America panel. “The grain itself, it somehow makes it feel much more personal.” Creator Frank Darabont also noted that the lightweight cameras can be squeezed guerilla-style into small spaces for a more intimate feel.

The team were forced to switch to digital capture during season ten when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. “The decision came about because there are fewer ‘touch points’ with digital than 16mm,” showrunner Angela Kang explained to the press. “We don’t have to swap out film every few minutes, for example.”

The pandemic also hit No Time to Die, pushing its release date back by 18 months and triggering the closure of the Cineworld chain, putting 45,000 jobs in jeopardy. But its reception so far has proved that there’s life yet in both celluloid capture and cinema as a whole.

Why “No Time to Die” and Other Productions Still Shoot on Film

How Digital Sensors Work

Last week I delved into the science of how film captures an image. This time we’ll investigate the very different means by which electronic sensors achieve the same result.

 

CCD

In the twentieth century, the most common type of electronic imaging sensor was the charge-coupled device or CCD. A CCD is made up of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitors, invented by Bell Labs in the late fifties. Photons striking a MOS capacitor give it a charge proportional to the intensity of the light. The charges are passed down the line through adjacent capacitors to be read off by outputs at the edges of the sensor. This techniques limits the speed at which data can be output.

My first camcorder, an early nineties analogue 8mm video device by Sanyo, contained a single CCD. Professional cameras of that time had three: one sensor each for red, green and blue. Prisms and dichroic filters would split the image from the lens onto these three CCDs, resulting in high colour fidelity.

A CCD alternates between phases of capture and read-out, similar to how the film in a traditional movie camera pauses to record the image, then moves on through the gate while the shutter is closed. CCD sensors therefore have a global shutter, meaning that the whole of the image is recorded at the same time.

CCDs are still used today in scientific applications, but their slow data output, higher cost and greater power consumption have seen them fall by the wayside in entertainment imaging, in favour of CMOS.

 

CMOS

Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor sensors (a.k.a. APS or active-pixel sensors) have been around just as long as their CCD cousins, but until the turn of the millennium they were not capable of the same imaging quality.

Each pixel of a typical CMOS sensors consists of a pinned photodiode, to detect the light, and a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor. This MOSFET is an amplifier – putting the “active” into the name “active-pixel sensor” – which reduces noise and converts the photodiode’s charge to a voltage. Other image processing technology can be built into the sensor too.

The primary disadvantage of CMOS sensors is their rolling shutter. Because they capture an image row by row, top to bottom, rather than all at once, fast-moving subjects will appear distorted. Classic examples include vertical pillars bending as a camera pans quickly over them, or a photographer’s flash only lighting up half of the frame. (See the video below for another example, shot an iPhone.) The best CMOS sensors read the rows quickly, reducing this distortion but not eliminating it.

Today, all the major cinema cameras use CMOS sensors, from Blackmagics to Alexas. Medium format stills cameras clung on to CCD technology longest for that higher image quality, but even these are now CMOS.

CMOS sensors are cheaper, less power-hungry, and not suspectible to the highlight blooming or smearing of CCDs. They are also faster in terms of data output, and in recent years their low-light sensitivity has surpassed CCD technology too.

 

Beyond the Sensor

The analogue voltages from the sensor, be it CCD or CMOS, are next passed to an analogue-to-digital convertor (ADC) and thence to the digital signal processor (DSP). How much work the DSP does depends whether you’re recording in RAW or not, but it could include things like correcting the gamma and colour balance, and converting linear values to log. Debayering the image is a very important task for the DSP, and I’ve covered this in detail in my article on how colour works.

After the DSP, the signal is sent to the monitor outputs and the storage media, but that’s another story.

How Digital Sensors Work