How rise of video shot good old film to death

It’s a presidential function at Uhuru Park in 1982.

The President is the late Daniel Arap Moi. A battery of journalists is eager to document the event. Security agents are intermingled with the crowd and journalists.

One cameraman, Henry Bwoka, unwittingly commits a near-grievous, verbal error. He urges his soundman to prepare.

“Let me know when you are ready so that when the President begins delivering his speech, I ‘shoot’ him,” he says. Instantly, a smartly dressed, sharpeared man sternly demands clarification, “Unasema nini wewe (What are you saying)?” Bwoka is jolted to his senses.

He clarifies, “No! I mean filming.” Around that time, it wasn’t fictitious to imagine two or more young filming students animatedly chatting about magazines, loading, cartridges and worse, as in Bwoka’s case, shooting!

These youngsters would be easy prey for hawk-eyed officers’ stealth stalking, aimed at having them whisked to nearby security installations for ominous interrogation.

At that time, several clandestine movements, such as Mwakenya, had been outlawed.

Words had to be carefully weighed lest they be misconstrued to imply that one was a renegade who merited being locked out of sight.

It’s the students’ instructors who would have come to their rescue by confirming that those filming terms had no relation to ballistics.

Many expressions used by filmmakers took a while to be assimilated by populations outside the filming realm.

“The shooting ratio for film was 1:1,” Bwoka says. “Each action was to be shot only once. You either got it or never. In a filming sense, a cameraman had to be a marksman!”

A lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya, Mbarack Ambe, was a film producer in the 1980s and 1990s in the Voice of Kenya (VoK).

“Deletion was unknown,” he says. “These days, shoot, preview and delete if the image isn’t satisfactory are the norm.”

Bwoka, a farmer in Bungoma county, retired as a filmmaker in 2016. He worked in the Ministry of Information for more than three decades. He partly does freelance filming.

Although many colleges in Kenya purport to offer courses in film production, arguably speaking, there’s none.

The original definition of film renders credence to this thought. Bwoka understands why.

WHAT FILM IS

Film is a thin flexible strip of material coated with a light-sensitive emulsion (silver halides) on one side. The emulsion could be silver bromide, chloride or a combination of the two — silver bromochloride.

The other side has a gelatinous base. Older generations of filmmakers refer to film as celluloid, to distinguish it from the later entrant, video. What’s currently taught in colleges is either video or television production. The principal medium of image registration is not film.

Bwoka joined the film industry in the late 1970s as a trainee at the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication (KIMC) where there was the Film Production Training Department.

A German institution, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation established the facility. Bwoka was among the second group. That was from 1979-81.

Five classes covered techniques in production, camera, sound, editing and the laboratory. Bwoka vividly recollects his orientation through all the sections.

These furnished him with a broad understanding of filming. KIMC used to be fondly described as the only college of its kind south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo.

During Bwoka’s time, each class had no more than 10 trainees of different nationalities. In Bwoka’s camera class, there were two Kenyans and three foreigners from Zambia, Ethiopia and the Gambia.

Nowadays, the market is flooded with different brands and models of present-generation digital video cameras. The film production training that Bwoka went through covered the 16 and 35mm film gauges.

Bwoka thinks it’s unfair to compare film with video. He believes, “Film is superior. The celluloid used to manufacture raw film stock is special. The picture quality is very high.”

He adds that film cameras require minor servicing, whereas video ones have several parts that easily wear out. Film production was much more expensive than video. “I think a 35mm camera in the 90s was going for about Sh50 million,” he says, adding, “Hollywood has stuck to film.”

When film was master, a cameraman was understood to be one who operated a motion-picture camera. Still camera operators were photographers.

At present, photography has been expanded to include both motion and still camera operations. The director of photography in a motion-picture production calls the shots.

The movie cameras that Bwoka was trained to operate are the Arriflex 35ST and 35BL, released in 1972. They were built to last. They are in the annals of filming history as having dominated scenes for almost 20 years.

The 35BL weighed about 20kg, including a standard lens. Its tripod, 12kg heavy, was sturdy. Any smaller tripod would draw the analogy of “an elephant sitting on a pickup truck”, Bwoka says. “It was important to have a friendly sound operator to help me carry the tripod.”

FILM FOOTAGE

The cameras’ final version, the 35BL4S, was birthed in 1989. Bwoka’s operations outlived the cessation of the 35mm camera series’ production.

The most well-known raw film stock manufacturers were the Eastman Kodak Company of the US, Fuji of Japan and Agfa Gevaert of Germany. Material from Kodak was the most dominant.

These films were supplied in 200, 400, 800 or 1,200 feet. It’s from these feet that film donated the word footage to video. The raw films were mostly for black and white negative and positive, colour reversal, negative and positive.

“Around [the year] 2000, one roll of 35mm 400ft was costing about Sh20,000,” Bwoka says. “Imagine having gone out with two rolls and you mess one.”

“Once raw film was exposed to light, that would be the end of it. It became fogged,” he says. “Unless exposed film was processed, it, too, was to be treated with utmost caution.”

Since film raw stock was sensitive to light, it was loaded into a magazine in pitch darkness, either in a darkroom or a black loading bag. The bag was also employed to offload an exposed film and securely place it in a can.

After loading the magazine, Bwoka mounted it onto the camera and engaged the transport claws to dip in and out of the sprocket holes as the film ran through the camera gate.

The film wound around a take-up spool. Picture and sound could either be recorded separately or jointly, depending on the camera. During the first three months of training, Bwoka was in sound.

“We used to record using the Nagra 4.2, powered by 12 size D batteries,” he says. “The recording was reel-to-reel and was of very good quality.”

He later narrowed his focus on the camera. His sound operator took care of the audio. Sometimes a cable connected the camera to the Nagra for synchronisation.

A clapperboard was labelled with the date, take, scene and roll. When the board was slammed while the camera rolled, the contact of the two sides guided the picture, matching with the sound produced. During post-production, the picture and independently recorded sound were merged.

MOTION PERCEPTION

Instead of using a cable to sync the sound with the picture, the alternative was to use synching gadgets that were inserted in the Nagra and the camera.

A retired soundman, Lawrence Musyoka says, “There was the double-system, where the pictures and sound for a scene were recorded separately.” He adds, “A signal was sent to the camera to trigger the recording of synchronous picture and sound.”

This is the method that Bwoka and his colleague used at Uhuru Park, before ‘shooting’ the President. The mode was ideal because of the masses of people crisscrossing around. Automatic settings were non-existent on 35mm film cameras.

Every operation was manual. Before Bwoka took his shots, a handheld exposure metre determined for him the amount of light falling on a subject or scene. Calibration of the light metre was contingent on the sensitivity of the film measured in ASA (American Standards Association).

“We had high-speed material for indoor and low-speed for outdoors. The light metre guided the operator on the correct aperture,” Bwoka says.

A 200 ASA film was less sensitive to light than a 500 ASA. The lens general aperture opening was from 2.4 to 16. Even though Bwoka was shooting ‘motion pictures’, the movement was and still is in video, just a notion. There is no movement.

Shooting with film enabled one to understand this concept best. The camera Bwoka used to operate had the standard option of shooting a filmstrip at 24 frames per second. A frame is a single still picture.

The frame divisions on a film are distinguishable. If there were some actual movements registered with the eye, the 24 frames were a series of 24 still pictures that were each slightly different from preceding ones.

When all these frames were projected in one second, motion perception arose. “If I recorded 12 frames per second, that would be fast motion,” Bwoka says. “If I were to get slow-motion, then I would calibrate the camera to 50 frames per second.”

For 16mm film, the camera Bwoka used was the Bolex series. “The 16mm is ideal for documentaries because it’s meant for room projection,” he says.

“The 35mm is for big screen projection, like in theatres.” Cinemas such as Kenya, Nairobi, 20th Century, Cameo, Odeon and Fox Drive-in had silver screens. Before the main movie’s projection, Bwoka’s 12-minute documentary shots were viewed. These shows were known as the Kenya Newsreel. Regarding the content of the newsreel, Bwoka says, “I used to travel outside the country to cover presidential functions for posterity purposes.”

This was especially during President Moi’s tenure.

FILM PROCESSING

By that time, it was evident that Bwoka’s shots were harmless to the President. “The presidential team would do it for TV news, and my colleague and I on 35mm film,” he says. Bwoka fondly reminisces about his visit to Swaziland. “I was the only one with a 35mm film camera,” he says.

“One white journalist came over to me, parted my back and said, ‘Gentleman, you are the only one here with a camera. The rest have toys.’” Bwoka understood what his admirer meant.

“I just told him, ‘Thank you.’” Before illuminating the silver screens, there was a long process of post-production.

After exposure, the images were latent; they couldn’t be seen unless processed. KIMC had one of the three 16mm film-processing laboratories. The other two were at the broadcasting houses in Nairobi and Mombasa. Ambe, the producer, recollects one Safari rally shooting.

A racing car veered off its track and spectacularly ploughed into a mound. His crew instantly fast-forwarded to a juicy news item.

“We stopped filming and alerted the laboratory staff at the Broadcasting House that we had a great clip to be processed.”

The laboratory technician, Sylvester Okondo (now deceased), processed the film. “He told us, “I can’t see anything.”’ Ambe was bewildered. “I asked, “What?”” When previewing, only a tiny spec of light flashed. The shot was a miss.

“Nobody went to the newsroom to tell those guys that there was no picture,” Ambe says. “We just quietly went home.”

Disappointment masked their faces. Kenya never had a 35mm laboratory. The material that Bwoka shot and the corresponding soundtracks were initially processed in Austria and later in Great Britain.

“In 1985, my colleague (now deceased) and I visited the Austria lab. Editing, laying of the sound and commentary took place there,” Bwoka says.

“The two-week trip was fascinating.” In 2000, the running of Kenya Newsreel ceased because of the high costs involved. The creeping in of cheaper tape-based camcorders further compounded the problem. Video would be edited in Kenya. A sign portending a death knell for film was on the horizon.

“I was still glued to film,” Bwoka says. “I had no choice but to join the video group.”

In Africa, the last countries to operate on film were Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. Though film has been shot dead by video in Kenya, the medium remains firmly etched in Bwoka’s memory.