Teenagers and young adults love film.
Over the last two decades, there has been a precipitous swing towards the use of digital technology in every day life. This started with the computer revolution of the late 70's and with the popularization of the Internet in recent years, the power of this revolution is clear to everyone. Today the devices we carry around in our pockets are more powerful then the best computers from a decade ago and the technology boom is growing at an exponential rate.
Today, there is a bit of backlash against modern technology from young adults who grew up only knowing the digital world. They've become more and more interested in the past as demonstrated through the ever growing vinyl business. We've seen an almost dead industry, skyrocket into a budding industry with an extremely passionate user base. This is slowly transitioning into other industries like photography with the return of instamatic cameras and motion pictures with the growing Super 8 business. Unfortunately, many film schools have retired their film cameras and have pushed students to only work digitally. Thus, when they leave school, they won't have the knowledge of working on film or understand the history behind it. Many students may find it cost prohibitive to work on film outside of school, where the costs simply budget them out of participating.
Celluloid Dreaming is a non-profit educational foundation designed to fill the void, offering FREE classes to high school and college students who wish to learn about filmmaking on celluloid. We also provide all the equipment, film stock and processing needed so students can work with film risk-free. In our eyes, being able to experiment without the associated costs, is groundbreaking.
We are here to provide an experience never before available, to insure that celluloid will stay strong for future generations.
It starts with a lot of passion.
A few years ago, film schools all over the world, switched from film to digital as their primary format for instruction. Many of those schools claimed they couldn't afford the up keep of the film equipment and students were more interested in shooting with the same equipment they would be in Hollywood. These excuses led to most schools dumping their film equipment and the very few that remain teaching film, are still working with antiquated cameras, lenses and instruction methods which don't leave our students prepared for their future profession. Plus, with professional productions moving almost exclusively to digital production, the film industry has taken a huge hit, almost to the point of extinction.
Looking at this problem, Filmmaker and Educator Tyler Purcell had a vision; A place where people from all over the world could come and learn about filmmaking on MODERN motion picture equipment FOR FREE. It's a wild idea and it's completely unsustainable financially, but it doesn't matter because the whole point is getting people shooting on film at ANY cost. As the years went on, Tyler saw rental houses were charging exorbitant amounts of money for a student rental packages and realized this was the first hurtle he'd conquer. He decided to buy a Super 16mm rental package, modern lenses and lights. He advertised all over Southern California and within a few days, the camera was out on it's first rental. This sparked the forming of Celluloid Dreaming, a 501c3 non-profit educational foundation.
The word Celluloid comes from earliest form of gelatin used to manufacture motion picture film. It harkens back to the old days when people went out experimenting with their cameras, which is exactly what Tyler wants to bring back. His vision doesn't stop there either, his eventual goal is to have a brick and mortar facility where students can learn the whole process including processing their own film and maintaining their own equipment. In his mind, if we don't train properly today, the knowledge will eventually disappear as more and more people leave the industry.
We survive by providing services like scanning, camera ervice and camera rentals. We don't ask our students for money, tho donations are very welcome. We just hope they will use our services in the future as they grow as filmmakers. Celluloid Dreaming offers educational videos under the youtube channel Cinema Repository, we offer camera service for all the major modern brands and cameras, we offer package deals of processing, prep and scanning on our own scanners and of course, we also offer rental packages. We have enough equipment to do some real damange, as we like to say.
With creative professionals like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, JJ Abrams and many more, dedicated to filmmaking on motion picture film, our goal is to bring the next wave of filmmakers who believe that filmmaking on motion picture film is a critical artistic art form which must be saved for future generations.
