How Does Kodak Make Film? (Kodak Factory Tour Part 2 of 3) – Smarter Every Day 275

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

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So we’re putting these on; we have to put clean suits on. Okay, sounds great. Oh, goggle up! Ah yes, we’re going to be doing pieces and parts, and I hope you guys know how to edit it all together. There’s a coater two, okay? Coater one! Oh my goodness, you definitely have laminar flow. That is all of why it works.

Hey, it’s me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! I have been saying this for quite a while now. I think some people believe me, some don’t, but I’m just going to keep saying it because it’s true: film is back! Photos taken on film have a certain magic to them, and a lot of people really love it, and I am one of them.

This journey started at the lab where I get my film developed in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s amazing! They taught us all about the film development process. Josh then hooked me up with Matt at Kodak, who invited me to Rochester, New York, to see the gigantic facility that’s been making film for over a hundred years.

In the first video, we learned how they made the backing or the floppy part of the film. They took these plastic pellets, put them in a grinder, then into a screw auger, heated up the film, and stretched it out. The big thing we learned in that first video is about this thing called the accumulator. It allows them to accumulate material inside the assembly line so they can stop at one end and make a cut when they roll it up onto a big roll. This allows the whole process to operate continuously without ever stopping.

Today, we’re going to start the next step of the process. We’re going to take those huge rolls of backing or support material that we made last time and load them into a huge machine in a different building. The whole goal is to apply a light-sensitive coating to the top of that backer. Maybe this is where the word film comes from; I don’t know. It’s like a thin film of emulsion. Different kinds of film have different coatings.

For example, today at the Kodak facility, they’re going to be making Ektar 100, which is known for its extremely fine grain and really good color saturation. So this is what we’re going to make today. But before we start, I want you to think about something: if you were to create the factory that applies a thin light-sensitive coating to the backing, like whether it be acetate or estar, how would you make that factory? What would it look like? Would you use a squeegee to apply a film?

What I can do is show you a visualization of the inside of your factory. Are you ready? It would look like this: complete darkness. The reason is that any light that leaks into the process while manufacturing film would expose the film and ruin it. Isn’t that interesting? So any machinery you make in this facility has to be able to operate in complete darkness with minimal human input. That’s fascinating!

Also, by the way, you’re applying this coating wet, and it has to be dried. While it’s wet, it’s very fragile. If you touch it on the wrong side, you ruin it. So how would you make this facility? Kodak’s solution to these problems is incredible. I got my hands on some engineering drawings, and we made a 3D model of the coating facility, and it looks amazing.

Once you understand how this facility works, it makes shooting with film even that much more rewarding. So if you’re in, let’s get started by heading over to the film sensitizing division so I can introduce you to Dr. Jeffrey Hanson. Jeff is going to be our guide along the way. He’s been doing this for over 30 years, and I can’t overstate how incredible it is that he gave us two days of his time to teach us how Kodak makes film. Jeff is one of the leading experts in the entire world at designing new photography films and manufacturing them, and as you’ll see, he is great at breaking down complicated topics.

Okay, so Jeff’s going to give us a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look at the science behind film. Right? I am. Okay, so we’re about to learn from the master himself how this stuff works. All my colleagues are going to let me not live that down.

Alright, so teach me, Jeff. How does this stuff work? So we’re going to kind of walk into this slowly before we get there. The first thing that you need to know is about the dimensions of film.

This is a cross-section of an average human hair. It’s about 60 to 70 microns. The support that we were talking about is down here and it’s 130 microns. This film is actually swollen, so it’s gelatin after some water is put into it. It’s a lot thicker, but this is like 25 microns, so it’s very thin.

So this film right here is thinner than the human hair. Oh yeah! So again, two parts to the film: the support could be the thickness of a human hair, 130 microns—that would be a very heavy, thick hair. But let’s say it’s close to that dimension. The chemicals that we put on top of it are 15 to 20 microns, and you can see it’s like half or even smaller than the dimensions of a human hair.

Got it, I’m with you. Alright, okay, so film has layers, and what’s in those layers is extremely important. That determines what kind of film you’re making. As we talked about in the film development episode with Indie Film Lab, film emulsion consists of silver halide crystals suspended in gelatin. Yes, gelatin is the same type of gelatin that you’ve heard of that’s made of animal bones. It starts like a powder, and Kodak does something very similar, and then they melt it to create different mixtures.

Color photography film is created by laying down different layers of these silver halide crystals mixed in gelatin. Some layers are designed to capture certain wavelengths and intensities of light, while other layers may be designed to filter out certain colors of light. By varying the chemistry and the sensitivity of each layer and cleverly stacking those layers in a certain order, Kodak is able to make those layers work together to record a full-color image.

To accomplish this, each layer has to have its own separate chemical makeup, which can be very complicated. Jeff walked me through how the chemistry works and how Kodak goes about making up the component parts of these layers from hundreds of different chemicals. I got to go in the basement and see the massive vats, where they use various techniques to precisely control the size and shape of the silver halide crystals that they’re growing.

He showed me where they make what they call melts—these are precisely controlled chemicals that go together to be piped upstairs, where they control the flow rate, the viscosity, and the temperature. It’s amazing—the complexity of their record-keeping system and their control systems to track and measure every ounce of every chemical is staggering. Jeff explained that even the diet of the animal they source the gelatin from affects the chemistry down the line, and they take this into consideration.

There is so much to learn about this process! Die couplers are just amazing. Jeff taught me so much about the chemistry of film; it’s incredible. I did not want to edit it out, but I wanted it all on the internet, so I put it all in a second channel video. There’s a link in the video description. If you’re a photographer like me, you’re going to love that video—go check out that link!

But for now, let’s constrain the problem a little bit. Let’s say we’re going to focus only on the mechanical application of over a dozen layers of this emulsion onto the backing. How do we do that? Look at it this way: we first unroll the backing that we made in the last video into the machine, and then we’re going to coat several layers at once.

At this point, it’s wet, jiggly gelatin, so we’re going to need to chill it and solidify it, and then we need to dry it to remove the water from it so it’ll stabilize. We then coat the rest of the layers, chill it, dry it again, and then when it’s dry, we can finally wind it all back up.

So let’s jump back into our 3D model so we can see what this simple-sounding process looks like when you lay it out in a factory. This is where you unwind, then coat, chill, dry, and for the second coat, you’re going to coat, chill, dry, and wind up. You got it: unwind, coat, chill, dry, coat, chill, dry, wind up. And there’s a lot of magic making that all happen.

What I’d like to do is have you experience this the way I experienced it in real time. When I first got there, I could feel a little bit of a time crunch because they said the line was about to start up. They were going to start the coating process, and you could actually see a part of it with the lights on, so I got really excited about that.

They were going to make a run of Ektar, and so we were going to get to go into the coder and see the machine start. Now, one thing about that is I didn’t really know what was going on at this moment, and you might feel that when you hear my questions, but it doesn’t matter because afterwards, we’re going to come out, and Jeff’s going to explain everything.

So unwind, coat, chill, dry, coat, chill, dry, wind up. We’re going to skip the unwind process right now, but we’ll come back to it. So we’re putting these on; we have to put clean suits on. Okay, sounds great.

Alright, ready? Yeah! Oh, this is so cool, man! It’s green! Alright, there are floors that we call dark floors, and to just keep people’s eyes from having to adjust all the time as you go from one floor to another, this is just a reduced light intensity. Got it, so there’s nothing special about the color other than it’s not bright light.

Okay, so here’s what I’m detecting already: this is a gigantic process. Jeff knows what’s happening. We’re trying to figure out where they’re at in the production cycle so that we can see something actually happening. Yep, I’m already lost!

You could hide me now, and nobody would know. You could bury me under the building, and nobody would have a clue. Well, it’ll only depend on how well you edit me. Fantastic! That’s awesome! I think we’re going to get along just fine, man.

Jeff, what’s your title here? So I’m the technical manager for product components, the film formulation quality, and commercialization. Wow! So my technical team is responsible for making sure the film works right. So you also do quality control? Oh, I like to look at this.

Oh wow, this room obviously looks like the mothership. All the controls in this building get at least initiated from this group here. How’s it going, guys? I’m Destin. Bobby Sanchez, nice to meet you! Nice to meet you!

So these two guys are coding specialists, and what we’re going to do is in 15 minutes, they’re going to do what we call a start right. In this film, I believe it’s about 12 layers. Yeah, I got eight liters. You got eight layers at one quarter and four, five, five.

Alright, so that’s a typical consumer film in this case, Ektar 100. In this room, they control the operation, but when we start, we’re going to see up on these monitors looking at coater 1 and coater 2, which you’ll see in a second. It’s an infrared camera that will look at the film while it’s coating to see if there are any physical defects showing up.

We look at the left edge, the right edge, and the center. I should have cut it short because I know how much time they need. Sorry, that’s one—it’s not you, it’s me. So just so you know, there’s a coater two, okay? And coater one! Oh my goodness!

Come up here really quick, okay? And you can see the hopper slats. Yes, the water is running down the door. Okay, the door is for air balance, and we’ll talk about that when we start coating. You hear tension on, which means we’re getting ready to coat, and we’ll talk about the floor here.

We’re going to have to go through a light box. Can I get close? You can get close, yeah. And I’m not going to see anything because you’re going to cut the lights off? No, no, no, no! You’ll see the colors start!

So where is it flowing from? Left to right? Well, it’s coming from here through these, and it’s coming underneath. Okay, it’s a center-fed hopper. We’re only using a portion of it. Is it flowing this way? Nope, it’s coming from the time it’s dropping.

Okay, and we’ll talk a little bit. So you yell whenever you need to get in here. You’ll see it flowing. Hold up; you’ll let me win five minutes from now? Okay, okay! So can I ask a question? I’m noticing we have laminar flow here. Yep, so stay back a few inches.

Okay, there are things that we don’t want to disrupt or drop anything in. You definitely have laminar flow; that is all of why it works! Laminar flow is what makes this work! Awesome! But the issues are that when we design the films, the viscosity of the bottom layer and the top layer are key to keeping the different layers from intermixing.

What you’re going to see happen is at coater 2—sorry, coater one is the bottom half of the pack. What we haven’t told you is this is approximately a mile-long process. Wow! Okay, underneath here, this hopper will slide back and engage the web that’s underneath. You can’t see the web, but you’ll see it when we’re in the coating room.

So if I understand correctly, we’ve got different chemicals coming out from each of these slots—different layers? Different layers! The layers could have five or six different components. The components could have 10 or 20 different chemicals.

So if I see correctly, that slot right there—yep, there’s fluid coming out of that water right now. And so this is a fluid process? Whoa! The whole thing is liquid! So this can coat 54 inches wide on acetate; we’re at 45 inches wide.

Okay, I’m going to try to get this right, and you tell me what I mess up. Okay, we have liquid that’s flowing out of these slots. There’s a bunch of little bitty slots here, and I’ve got liquid flowing over, and if I can control the flow rate of each liquid that’s coming out, I can keep them in layers.

That’s right! I can keep them in layers, and so you have to have laminar flow to do that, right? Because if it mixed up and got turbulent, you would have no color separation. The images—you’d still get an image; it just wouldn’t look right, right? But yes, we keep laminar flow, so that’s the secret.

And so I can actually see that I won’t mess the process up here. So what I’m looking at right here is—watch your finger there! I will not touch anything! What I’m looking at right there is a stream of liquid that looks like one uniform waterfall, but it’s actually a series of waterfalls in parallel. Exactly!

And by the way, we do a curtain hopper. What will happen is as this moves back, the roll will get ready underneath this pan. You will see a pan in the other room when we go infrared. That’s catching everything, and it will pop out of position very quickly and then drop about 12 to 14 inches as a curtain.

Now, if you pour any liquid out of a jar, it necks down. We can’t have that; it’s got to stay absolutely laminar all the way down the sides. We have some guide wires that help, but that’s one of the important steps of our curtain coder.

Will you show me the guide wire? I see it! So on the edge there, right there! So that keeps—when you say neck down, you can’t have the liquid neck down this way, right? As it starts, you’ll see various flows that aren’t laminar. As it gets started, you’ll see the colors not being lined up; they’ll slowly get better, and then Bob will be going through with a pick to make sure that there’s nothing stuck in the slots.

So Bob, you’re the expert at making sure the flow is correct? Yeah, you’ll see when it’s happening. It’s going to start. I got to get in here! Yep, where do I need to be? I got to get in there; I gotta form a meniscus in the back here.

Hey, Destin! Yes, sir? We’re going to move to the next coater. Okay, can we let him finish this real quick, or do we need to go right now? I’m sorry; he seems okay with it, so you can keep—you can stay. Yeah, we’re 800 feet out, so we’re fine. Where do you want me? Is it okay to stay here? You’re good; we’re going to move quickly through a rolling door.

Alright, we’re going to head to the other coater because he’s going to get ready to close the shield. Got it! Jeff, I don’t think you and I can both fit in here. I can guarantee you that! I’m lucky if I fit in by myself! Destin, I like you!

Boom! Okay, so lights are on! This is great! This is awesome! Forgive me, your name one more time? Santos. Sometimes they start at the bottom, and you can see the first layer, second layer, third layer, all the way up. It came out all either at once or the top went first, so that’s why it all looked magenta.

So you kind of lost some of the wow factor of seeing it coat. So I need to be ready. This rec—you’re not going to see color here because this is just the yellow pack. Okay, so this is the top of the film plus what we call the SOC, the overcoat, which has matte beads in it—some of the chemistry that’s necessary—but it’s going to happen really fast.

So do I need to be—where do I need to be, Santos? Can I be right here? If I don’t touch anything, am I good here? Yeah, there’s the yellow! There it goes!

Santos, I’m seeing little bitty streaks, and I can actually see the turbulence in there. Yeah, just keep watching because it’s still flushing water out. Yeah, right now it’s still unstable, and then I’m going to wait for the last—you can see a little blob there. Here it comes! Now it becomes stable!

It’s stable now! I see all those little lines out! He’s going to get rid of the streak