In the two decades since digital video revolutionized production and post, filmmakers have had to make a choice between shooting film and shooting digitally.
Shooting digitally affords the filmmaker expedience and an ever-increasing palette of technology, including sophisticated grain and emulation tools in the finishing suite. But shooting on actual physical film is still really the only way to imbue it with that classic, indescribable analog beauty and vibe that’s been at the heart of filmmaking since the dawn of cinema.
So which choice is best? Film or digital? As it turns out, the answer just might be both, thanks to a new process developed by FotoKem called SHIFT analog intermediate.
The SHIFT process takes digital footage, performs some primary color on that footage in the digital realm, and then scans that digital footage onto analog, celluloid film (an “analog intermediate”). This “shift” onto actual film stock imbues the digital footage with all the qualities of film we love, such photochemical halation, super-subtle authentic gate weave, real film grain you just can’t get from software, and all those random and tiny color nuances that only film can provide.

FotoKem’s SHIFT was developed in collaboration with Academy-Award-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser.
2021’s Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve and 2022’s The Batman, both lensed by Fraser, were the first major studio features to employ the process and helped set the stage for a host of other projects.
One of those was one of 2022’s biggest grossing horror-thrillers: the sleeper indie hit Smile, directed by Parker Finn and shot by Charlie Sarroff. The film was shepherded through the SHIFT process by FotoKem’s Senior Colorist Dave Cole, who served as the film’s Supervising Digital Colorist.
SHIFT was also used on Marvel’s special presentation Werewolf By Night, a stylistic ode to Universal horror films lensed by Zoë White and directed by Michael Giacchino, lending the film on a classic black-and-white horror celluloid vibe. And They Cloned Tyrone, a sci-fi comedy for Netflix shot by Ken Seng and directed by Juel Taylor, feels straight out the era of disco and grindhouse with its authentic grain and color feel, thanks to SHIFT.

Mike Sowa, FotoKem’s Final Colorist on They Cloned Tyrone, says director Taylor initially wanted SHIFT to utilize 5219 camera stock to help give his film a very gritty, dirty 70s look. “With 5219, you get a film grain that becomes, in my opinion, part of the film. It’s present everywhere.” But ultimately, Netflix and DP Seng preferred a slightly less “grain-forward” look, so the filmmakers settled on 5213 stock, which Sowa says, “is still an aggressive grain, but for me is like watching film. Adding the filmic look (via SHIFT), just tends to treat the image in a much more pleasant way. In the end, when you sit and watch it, it’s like you’re watching a movie shot on actual film. It’s pretty amazing”.
And while Dune and The Batman are ostensibly the biggest and most visible titles that have won over filmmakers to FotoKem’s SHIFT process, the origins of the process can be traced back to a film with significantly fewer sandworms and masked vigilantes: the 2018 Adam McKay film Vice, which was also shot by Fraser, and began with a ton of camera tests.
As FotoKem Senior Colorist Dave Cole says, who served as Supervising Lead Digital Colorist for both The Batman and Dune, “Vice was shot on a multitude of formats: Super 8, Super 16, 35mm, a lot of analog video cameras, but one of the tests that was done was to shoot on an Alexa 65. And one of the things we were discussing was ‘I wonder what this would look like on film.’”
Ultimately, the creatives on Vice decided to keep everything on film and not shoot digital, but the seed of what would grow into FotoKem’s SHIFT had already been planted, including a new term to describe the process — analog intermediate.
When camera tests began for Dune, Fraser, and Villeneuve tried 15-perf 65mm, 35mm, and two ARRI Alexa cameras—the LF and the Alexa 65, the SHIFT workflow really began to take shape. According to Supervising Colorist Dave Cole, as a result of those tests, Director Denis Villeneuve knew he didn’t want to shoot film, as he felt the grain in the 35mm footage made the movie feel older than the futuristic, modern tale he wanted to tell with Dune. “He wanted the beauty of film but he didn’t want to make it feel old, because it’s a futuristic, modern tale. Yet he wanted the character of film… but also the flexibility that was allowed by shooting on the Alexas.”
So the Alexa test (digital) footage was color graded, then shot to film negative on 1-ASA dupe stock, then processed, scanned back, and matched back to the original digital grade. “Then we had a good comparison of pure digital versus going through this new analog intermediate, as well as a good comparison to true 35mm and 65mm acquired film,” says Cole. “Because it was being shot to a dupe neg stock, so a 1-ASA stock, the grain was minimal. It was very fine. It didn’t add a lot of character to the filmout process. More of the character was all of those interlayer relationships and the weave and the jitter and halation through the layers, and all of the other great stuff, more than the grain itself.”
Says FotoKem’s Principal Color Scientist Joseph Slomka of Dune’s SHIFT process, “We imparted the halation, the grain characteristics, the weave, the flicker, and some small photochemical variations that were present in film processing and then laid those very subtle cues on top of the digital images.”
But as this was the first time FotoKem had tried this new analog intermediate process on a feature, the FotoKem team quickly realized that the negative film which the digital footage was being scanned to needed to be thought of not as just another casual step in the process. The negative needed to be thought of as a data storage medium. “Because we want to have full flexibility to manipulate the image as much as we need to after it’s actually gone to film,” says Dave Cole.

To ensure this, the FotoKem team ran dozens of iterative tests to make sure that the process maximized the negative as said data storage medium, including development into the color science, and analyzing various digitally recorded negatives to drop the newly scanned images into the grading system at an 85-95% match to the original grade.
Traditionally, when prepping a film for theatrical exhibition and video, a standard, printable archive negative is one of the deliverables, with the goal being to make sure the final digital outputs look as close to the print as possible. But when creating an analog intermediate via SHIFT, the focus is more on using the negative as a medium without the need to create a traditional print.
Says Slomka, “The goal was to create an intermediate on analog film that preserved the color in all the decisions that were made in the digital intermediate process over many detailed weeks of work, but then put them on film in a way that added the characteristics of film, all while preserving those original color decisions and coming back to a final product that can make it to theatrical, HDR, and home video deliverables.”
SHIFT was similarly used on The Batman, also shot by Greig Fraser. But bringing the beauty and unique vibe of film to the Gotham City aesthetic required an even more intensive series of tests and experimentation, as Fraser was keen on a 70s film vibe a la Klute, Chinatown, and The French Connection while keeping the shadows detailed and visible, and while still allowing the colors to pop.
After having pinned down the look for Dune, FotoKem’s task was to create a film-noir look that Fraser wanted for The Batman, while still allowing all the flexibility of using digital cameras. So Cole worked closely with Fraser to understand the creative concept for the look of this film, “Traditionally, if you were shooting on negative, you could choose what camera stock you’re going to shoot certain scenes on, you might push or pull, you could do a lot of processing that can affect that negative. In the digital realm, it’s different. You have your exposures and things like that, but it’s not like you can change your film stock. So Greig wanted to bring in some of that flexibility from the traditional filmmaking process while having a lot of the benefits of the digital process. So that’s where the idea of doing a skip bleach came in and also duping onto IP.”
On a skip bleach, the negative retains a lot of silver, which causes the highlights to halate differently, adds a great amount of contrast, and removes a lot of color from the image, but Fraser and Cole wanted to avoid both of those choices.
“Because a lot of The Batman was dark, we didn’t want this high contrast because it means we would never see into the dark because the darks would all be very compressed and we wanted to maintain the color of the movie. There’s not a lot of super-vibrant colors in the film because it is this earthy and gritty world of Gotham, but when the colors do come, we really wanted them to pop, so we didn’t want it to be muted in any way, except what was stylistically done either in the grade and/or in lighting. So what we did is we still still skip bleached the negative but because we’re bringing it back through a digital process, we could retain the color, we could retain the contrast, and manipulate those how we wanted, rather than a traditional process which would just dictate what it was like—and it can be random when you’re doing it photochemically. You get what you get. Whereas in the digital realm, we picked and chose the elements we liked from that skip bleach process.”
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all process. What was done on Dune is very different than what was done on The Batman,” says Slomka, “It required an incredible amount of consistency and lab expertise because one of the requirements of the process is to keep the time short, so all of the elements typically on a bleach bypass process, the results are a little bit variable.”
The end result is a film shot by Fraser with a visual signature completely its own, and which looks and feels completely different from his work on Dune, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
“It’s all about this organic randomness that we couldn’t emulate. And while the emulation is good, there’s just something about the real thing that you can’t put your finger on, but it draws you into the image and it allows the audience to believe,” says Cole.
FotoKem is learning that with the SHIFT process, artists are seeing less of a gap between film and digital, and thinking of the analog intermediate as a bridge between the two realms.
Says Cole, “It’s straddling both worlds. You know, it’s not about saying, ‘I’m a film guy and I love film,’ or ‘I’m a digital person and I love working in digital.’ It’s just embracing another way to tell a story. So why would you choose a particular lens? Why do you light a shot a certain way? Or if you’re editing, why do you cut on a certain frame? These are all just creative choices so this is just an extra creative tool that can be used in the process to tell a story. And because there are different techniques that we can apply in the lab, there’s no reason that we can’t use these on future films, like pushing and pulling neg to introduce grain, or we’ve already done skip bleach in one way, but there might be other ways that we can use that process. So it’s just having more tools in our arsenal to ultimately get a creative look on the screen that everyone loves.”