In May 2012, I published one of the first posts on this blog about the end of 35 mm in festival distribution. Four years later, 35 mm is a distant memory; it truly feels like much more time has passed since its disappearance.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about this article.
We are relocating our 35 mm warehouse at ECAM, where we still keep Betacam copies, DVDs, and some old festival catalogs.
It should be noted that after 10 years of distributing Madrid en corto, in addition to the short films from ECAM, we have a hundred copies in storage that were circulating in festivals at the time.
Here you can see the 35 mm print warehouse where we kept all the copies before the move, all of them labeled and ready for festival traffic (all the boxes in the upper area are DVD copies).
Now all of this is over; physical media has disappeared. I am no longer just talking about 35 mm prints, but anything that requires a physical medium; we are recycling Betacam, DVD copies, and catalogs can now be consulted online.
The revolution experienced by the film and distribution sector has been very radical; I do not believe any other sector has undergone a similar change. I am saying that all the experience accumulated by many professionals in 35 mm is no longer useful for digital; everything is different.
Furthermore, in our case, we had been accumulating all kinds of media, documentation, copies, packages, etc., and in one year (from approximately 2012 to 2013), everything changed so radically that we no longer need any physical media.
But I do not say this with regret; I believe the change has been very positive in all aspects: the quality of projection formats has increased, and the complexity of managing materials, as well as distribution costs, has been reduced.
We are starting a new stage where we no longer store formats on any medium, be it paper, magnetic tape, DVDs, celluloid, and so on.
See you in the cloud.