After 90 years of motion picture film processing in Detroit, Grace & Wild Studios has ceded to the increasing dominance of the digital world and closed its FilmCraft division in favor of handling file based workflows and film archival work.
Jeff Wanless, FilmCraft’s lab manager for 13 years, says FilmCraft will refer processing requests to Chicago’s Filmworkers Astro Labs. With the closing last year of Minneapolis’ and now FilmCraft in Detroit having ended, Astro stands as the Midwest’s sole 35/16mm processing lab.
Full article here.
The motion picture film processing industry is admittedly somewhat of a dying industry. Each year, digital video and HD filmmaking continue to take a bigger and bigger bite out of film sales which leads to a motion picture film lab closing every six months or so.
I'm well aware of these closures and the pressures that induce them because I work at one of the last motion picture film processing labs still standing on the east coast.
However, this particular quote in this article caught my attention:
Two factors led to the closing: the inevitable and increasing transition from film to digital capture and the killing of Michigan’s top-rated film incentives by Gov. Rick Snyder this year, which vastly reduced the amount of film the lab was processing.
.....
“Thanks in part to Michigan film incentives, in the last four years the lab processed film for over 20 features — 500,000 feet for the feature ‘30 Minutes or Less’ alone,” amounting to 1.5 million feet of film,” says Wanless. That amount sunk to 100,000 feet this year.
Ladies and gentlemen, your "pro-business" republican policies at work.
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