Film Hack - Fuji Eterna

I like shooting movie film. It is cheap and plentiful and with my new DIY ECN2 chems, it is super cheap to develop at home with accurate color. The one and only down-side is the remjet. For the uninitiated, remjet is a powder-coat on the back of movie film that serves as the anti-halation layer as well as an anti-static agent for films that travel at high speed through a movie camera. There are numerous approaches to dealing with remjet, but they do not include just sending the film off to your usual color lab. The remjet comes off in their machines and tends to get redeposited on your (and everyone else's film). That makes them unhappy with you and you will be invited to never send them any film again. So I choose to develop color films of all sorts at home, but I still need to deal with the remjet for the same reason. I don't want it coming off in my developer, bleach or fixer and then getting redeposited into the emulsion of future films. So I use a sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) solution (about a tablespoon per liter) as my first pre-soak (about 2-3 minutes). Then I shake it like crazy... I mean really shake it like you are trying to prank your little brother with a can of root beer. Shake it for a solid minute, then pour it out. It should look grey. Then rinse and pour until the rinse water is clear. Now the remjet is gone and you can continue with your regularly scheduled development process. That's it! Well, not quite. If that was it, then this post would be done, but it isn't. Keep reading.

Often, the soak-shake-rinse process is imperfect. That means that there are places on the film where the remjet doesn't come off. So at the end I will take the film off of the developing reel and gently, oh so gently, rub the back of the film with my thumb under warm running tap water. Even then, there are places I miss, but I can't tell where they are until the film has been hung, dried and scanned. Then I see something like this.

GAAAH! What a mess! Now what? One alternative is to make another bath of bicarb and try some more gentle rubbing to see if I can get it cleaned up. But that is an iterative process that could take a loooooong time, and I am impatient. I honestly can't remember how I discovered the second (and much better) alternative. I must have been desperate, or maybe it was an accident. Here it is, the secret to quickly and easily (and completely) removing bits of remjet from your film. Hand sanitizer. That's right. Get a couple of those little cloths that you clean your glasses with. Lay the film emulsion-side down on one. Then get a little dab of the sanitizer on your finger and gently rub it on the back of your negative. Don't rub so long that it evaporates, just long enough to dissolve the remjet. Then use the other cloth to wipe it off. This is what I get after that process. Note: I did not correct, adjust or clean either of these scans. They are "straight outta scanner".

"But James", you ask, what happens if I get the hand sanitizer on the emulsion side by accident?" I honestly don't know. My intuition says that in all the times I have done this, I must have at some point gotten sanitizer on the emulsion, but I have never noticed any smudging, smearing or any other artifact that made me think I had. So the usual disclaimers apply. This is the internet. I am not a professional (or even trained) film cleaning expert. I claim no responsibility for the destruction of every frame you shot at your cousin's wedding if you try this procedure. Try it first on a crappy shot of a Christmas concert! Happy shooting!!

Motion Picture Film

Ever since Cinestill hit the market, shooting movie film in still cameras has become all the rage. Not being one to miss a passing bandwagon, I thought I would jump on and see where the ride went. However, being err... "thrifty", I did not want to pay $10/roll + s/h for 35mm film. Also, I seem to have a good thing going with expired film, so why fix what doesn't seem to be broken? With that philosophy in mind, I went searching for the cheapest movie film I could find on a reasonably sized (<400ft) roll. I want to try it, not shoot it exclusively for the next 10 years. I looked at a LOT of different sellers and emulsion numbers. I also started researching the "remjet" issue. I would have to get that layer of black gunk off the back of the film either before shooting it ("premoval") or after exposing, but before developing. The remjet layer is there for anti-halation as well as anti-static for when the film is whizzing through a motion picture camera. Anti-halation is nice and most still films have a layer of dye on the back of the film to keep light from reflecting off of the pressure plate inside the camera and making glowing "halo's" in the highlights on the film. Premoving the remjet will eliminate this benefit, but if you are going to send the film off for processing, it has to be done. The machines that process film will not remove it and when it comes off in the machine's chemistry and mechanics, the operator will be unhappy with you. Cinestill removes the remjet for you, so that is part of the price you pay (which is fair, but for me unnecessary since I dev my own C-41). So what did I do?? I did both premoval and nothing. Keep reading and I'll explain.

I rolled up one 12-exp roll just like I would for any other bulk film. This will be the "control" sample and I will not do anything special to it regarding the remjet. The other roll, I measured the length and spooled it onto a Paterson developing spool and put it in the tank for 15min with a solution of 2Tbs Borax in 500mL water. At the end of 15min, I agitated the tank vigorously for about a minute. I really shook it hard. Disappointingly, the liquid that came out was just sort of a weak greenish solution. Subsequent rinses were clear. There was no sign of black flakes, so either, my solution did nothing to remove the remjet, or the remjet was really thin. A third option is that there is no remjet on this film. I'm not sure what remjet looks like, so I can't say, but the film is Super F-Series which does appear to have a remjet backing according to the interwebz. So at this point, I just dried the film in a 'dark' place and rolled it up into a canister. Here is what the two treatments look like side by side. The premoval roll is on the left and the untreated roll is on the right. There is clearly a difference between them, but is it remjet or just anti-halation dye?

I shot both rolls at iso 400 in the same camera, mostly in cloudy daylight. For this test, I'm not so much interested in color rendition as much as just the processing workflow. I fully expected to see some black bits stuck to the film and/or floating in my developer. The developer came out clear as always, so I figured the remjet must still be stuck fast to the film and I would have to do a removal at the end. To my surprise though the film was clear. The two films were developed in the same tank at the same time and I couldn't tell which was which until I looked at the specific images. There was no sign of remjet anywhere. Here are a couple of images from the "control" roll that was not pre-treated. I scanned these on an Epson Perfection V600 using the auto color correction, but nothing else in post. The color is shifted/cast a little as you might expect with cross processing, but other than that, there is nothing notable. The grain is there and looks about how my other expired color films look, so that's that.

Here are a couple of shots from the premoval roll. It looks like the film got fogged during the drying process. I did my best to keep it absolutely dark, but probably failed to some degree. There also seems to be some damage to the film. This is either chemical from the borax or mechanical from the vigorous shaking. Hard to say without more testing. Having said that, I will probably not do any more tests since the untreated roll came out nice without any ill effects from the remjet. I will just shoot this like any other color negative film.