Kodak motion picture film 5247

Now I may be tempted to talk about Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Back to the Future and The Shining. What they don’t have in common is the costumes. What they really have in common is that Harrison Ford took a part in two of these and hadn’t in the other two. All is in par. But besides that, they were all shot on color negative cinema film Kodak 5247.

Kodak 5247, as any other color negative parallel shall go with its positive meridian so the completeness of yin-yang circle of light, color and popcorn be bright. The look that this old motion picture portrayed have been achieved by colorists, carefully combining the negative and the positive film, as the combination produced the right click of aesthetics. As I am not, obviously, going to copy this negatives for Kodak any Ttheater but to my old Epson scanner, I will skip the positive part and give you my witness of encounter with the negative emulsion. (However, cool discussion here and here).

There are many 5247 emulsions that Kodak produced between 1950 (as EI 16D) and 1983 (as EI 125T) [source]. Mine was from the latest batches, if I conclude correctly based on its sensitivity.

I’ve never developed this film myself — it has been designed for process ECN-2 (click for details). My examples below have been developed in C-41. Colors are definitely shifted, as this is not the original process, but also have this green tone, if you compare to stills from movies [example] [example] [example] [example].

So here are my examples.

Surprisingly, this 30 years old film lost almost no sensitivity — I exposed it as ISO 50 and a filter 85 for a daylight.

Don’t forget to tell the lab (if you are going to C-41 ’round-the-corner photo service) that there is a rem jet on this film. Rem jet will definitely pollute the chemicals and cause troubles to the machine.