It might actually be giving you more credit.

If you are holding a digital camera, recording images onto a memory card, editing those images on a computer, coloring them with software, adding digital effects, and delivering the finished work as a digital file, where exactly is the film?

There isn't any.

Yet we still call the person doing all of this a filmmaker.

Why?

Mostly because that's what we've always called the person who makes movies.

I know the word has come to mean that. Open a dictionary and it will tell you a filmmaker is someone who makes movies.

Fine.

But that answers a question about language.

It doesn't answer the question I'm asking.

What are you actually doing?

A movie is something you watch.

Film is something you can hold.

For most of movie history, those two things were connected because film was the technology we had to make movies.

A film camera actually contains film.

Light enters the camera and exposes a photosensitive emulsion on a strip of physical material. That film has to be developed through a chemical process before you can see the photographed image.

That's film.

Now pick up a modern digital camera.

There is no film inside it.

There is an electronic image sensor. The camera turns information from that sensor into digital data. That data gets recorded onto electronic storage.

No film stock.

No film developing.

No film laboratory.

No chemical image has to be created.

You are using a completely different technology.

You are recording digital video.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

This is where I think we lost our way.

For a long time, if you wanted to photograph live action for a theatrical movie, film was the practical technology that made it possible.

So naturally, the words became connected.

You made a movie on film.

People went to see a film.

The person making it became a filmmaker.

That made sense.

Then something happened.

The technology changed.

Electronic video developed.

Analog video developed.

Digital video developed.

Image sensors improved.

Computers became powerful enough to process enormous amounts of image information.

Digital storage replaced reels and videotape.

Nonlinear editing moved the cutting room into software.

Digital color replaced enormous amounts of laboratory work.

Visual effects moved into computers.

Digital projection arrived.

Digital distribution arrived.

And eventually something remarkable happened:

You could make the entire movie without film.

Not some of it.

The entire thing.

This is where the conversation usually gets emotional.

Forget emotion for a minute.

Ask the question literally.

Can digital technology record moving photographic images?

Yes.

Can it record color?

Yes.

Can it record high dynamic range?

Yes.

Can those images be edited?

Yes.

Colored?

Yes.

Composited?

Yes.

Duplicated?

Yes.

Projected onto a theater screen?

Yes.

Distributed around the world?

Yes.

Preserved and stored?

Yes.

Can digital systems reproduce or emulate visual characteristics that people associate with film, including grain, halation, contrast, color treatment, and other characteristics?

Yes.

So what can't digital reproduce?

The actual photochemical reaction inside photographic film.

Of course it can't.

That's chemistry.

But the chemistry was never the movie.

It was the process we once needed to create the photographed images that became the movie.

Digital technology doesn't have to reproduce the chemistry.

It replaced the need for it.

That is an enormous difference.

You can still buy motion-picture film.

You can still put it into a film camera.

You can still expose it.

You can still process it.

You can still make a movie with it.

If that's what you want to do, do it.

But understand what changed:

You no longer have to.

That is the line history crossed.

Film went from being a necessary part of making photographed motion pictures to being an optional recording medium.

Digital technology can take a movie from camera to screen without photographic film ever existing anywhere in the production chain.

That is not disrespecting film.

That's what happened.

Film is alive as a choice.

Film is dead as a requirement.

Not because I want to take anyone's title away.

Quite the opposite.

I want the people using modern technology to understand what they actually have in their hands.

Look at what we created.

Digital cameras.

CMOS and CCD image sensors.

Digital recording.

RAW image data.

Codecs.

Digital storage.

Nonlinear editing.

Computer-generated imagery.

Digital color correction.

Digital compositing.

Digital projection.

Worldwide digital distribution.

And now computational imaging and generative AI are taking us somewhere else again.

Thousands upon thousands of engineers, technicians, programmers, camera designers, editors, colorists, video engineers, and inventors built that world.

And after all of that innovation, what did we decide to call the person using it?

A filmmaker.

Think about that.

We created an entirely new technological system and then gave the person using it the name of the old recording medium.

Why?

"Because that's what everybody calls it."

And that is exactly where education should begin, not end.

If a twelve-year-old picks up a phone and asks:

"Am I filming?"

We have a choice.

We can say:

"Yes. That's what everybody calls it."

Or we can actually teach the kid something.

We can say:

"You're recording video. Film is another way of recording images. Both can be used to make a movie."

There.

A twelve-year-old now understands something that our industry has managed to make confusing.

Film is a recording medium.

Video is an electronic imaging technology.

A movie is the finished work.

They are not the same thing.

That doesn't mean you can't use the word film to mean movie in ordinary conversation.

People do.

Language evolves.

But when we're teaching cameras, production, recording technology, or history, we should know the difference.

Otherwise we aren't teaching.

We're repeating.

And eventually repetition becomes convention, convention becomes instruction, and:

This is the part I don't understand.

Why does digital moviemaking need to borrow film's identity?

It doesn't.

Digital video isn't some cheap imitation of film that needs the word film to make it respectable.

Look at what it can do.

Look at what you're holding.

A camera can record extraordinary images onto something the size of a postage stamp. You can move those images into a computer, change them, copy them perfectly, send them across the planet, project them forty feet wide, or put the finished movie into the pocket of someone on the other side of the world.

And we somehow decided this technology wasn't impressive enough to deserve its own identity?

I don't buy that.

Digital didn't need to become film.

It made film unnecessary to make the movie.

That's a technological achievement worth recognizing.

If you actually shoot photographic film, filmmaker describes the medium you're working with perfectly.

If you're shooting digital video, you're using digital video.

If you're creating animation, you're an animator.

If you're creating CGI, you're working computationally.

If you're generating imagery with AI, that's another technology again.

And if all of these people are working toward the same thing?

There's already a perfectly good word for that.

MOVIEMAKER.

The word tells us what you make without pretending to tell us how you made it.

That's the beauty of it.

Film can make a movie.

Analog video can make a movie.

Digital video can make a movie.

Animation can make a movie.

CGI can make a movie.

AI can contribute to or generate a movie.

The technologies can change.

The movie remains the work.

Film deserves its history.

The people who mastered it deserve credit for mastering it.

The engineers who built it deserve credit for building it.

The artists who still choose it should call it exactly what it is:

Film.

But video deserves its history too.

Digital technology deserves its history.

The engineers who created the electronic and digital tools we now take for granted deserve to have their work called by its name.

And AI, whether we love it, hate it, fear it, or embrace it, is creating another history right now.

We don't preserve history by calling everything the same thing.

We preserve history by knowing the difference.

At least, you don't have to be.

If there's no film in your camera, don't be embarrassed by that.

Don't hide the extraordinary technology you're actually using behind the name of the technology it replaced.

You aren't practicing a lesser version of somebody else's craft.

You're making movies with tools earlier generations could barely have imagined.

Learn those tools.

Learn where they came from.

Learn the difference.

Give the people who created them some credit.

And then make something worth watching.

The movie is the work.
The medium tells the story of how we got there.

The craft is the art.
The medium defines the tools we use.

Educate, don't mimic.