Standing at the edge of sequinned water, on a sunkissed shore off Salter Point, Tabitha Murdoch is waiting for the right moment. It’s warm and quiet and there is just about a minute left in her roll. Her eyelashes press softly against the viewfinder and she pulls the shutter. The film flutters through, purring, tattooing the swimming ducks and stillness of the river, gentle hands moving through soft hanging branches onto cellulose triacetate. Scenes for a short documentary about her mother’s climate activism in the state’s Mid West. 

The second-hand Super 8 Hanimex XL500-S Murdoch wields is just one film camera in a growing collection. The 20 year old may be a child of the digital age but many young Australians like her are part of a cultural resistance, an increasing number of those passionate about creating with analog film technology.

Demand for Kodak film has doubled in the past five years and camera manufacturers like Leica and Pentax are making new film SLR and point and shoot cameras to cater for the new creatives. While demand for analog isn’t matching the numbers before the explosion of digital technology, the resistance of film is so strong some of the world’s biggest manufacturers have had a shortage in recent years. The mark of a new-age analog resurgence fuelled by filmmakers and hobbyists craving the artistry, physicality and nostalgia of film. 

Murdoch was introduced to film photography at the age of 12 by her older sister who used her as a model. At 15, the Geraldton native found a film camera with missing pieces at a local op shop, and started collecting other cameras, taking them apart to build one working machine. 

Starting to shoot her own photos, she fell in love with film. The creative freedom, the risk and tangibility of the process, letting the candidness of a moment take over, she says, are all so much more fulfilling and just can’t be replicated digitally. 

“Film definitely feels more personal and true to form. Shooting digitally kind of dulled down any idea I had and in our world now, something so purely creative, it’s so much more valuable and so much more fun,” she says, noting that analog technology provides a welcome disconnect from an ever-increasingly digital world. “I like the mechanical feel of my camera too, you can feel it whirring, you can feel the magic happening.”

This time last year Murdoch transitioned into Super 8 and motion picture film. A medium that puts her creative ideas to screen, without having to worry about all the technical and logistical aspects of modern digital filmmaking. 

About once a month, she’ll buy a roll of Kodak 50D stock from nanolab, a husband-and-wife processing operation in regional Victoria and one of the last Super 8 labs in the country.

“Whenever I can, whenever I can find some free time,” she says of how often she likes to shoot. Between her work and university commitments, it usually takes from a month to a couple days for her to fill a roll, before she sends it back to nanolab for development. 

The whole process costs upwards of $140 for about three minutes of footage but whether it’s motion picture or photography, Murdoch maintains little interest in shooting digitally.

“I love that you have no idea until you get it back and the uncertainty makes it so much more precious,” she says. “It feels very worthwhile. I just think you get so much more of an experience out of it and it kind of defies these times of seemingly unlimited resources and capabilities.” 

While not every innovation is cause for concern, Murdoch believes we’ve reached a point where we’re now going backwards and, like the emergence of AI and generative content, people are using advancements in technologies to “just make things worse”. She says lots of young people are willing to put time and money towards something that may seem redundant as act of resistance. 

“I think there will always be people in counter-culture, people who want to be contrarian and willing to do the opposite of what is easiest and those people are often are so culturally important,” Murdoch says. 

“The return to analog to just make things, to create for the joy of it, when so much is a purely economic endeavour, is really beautiful and a true testament to creatives still existing and soldiering on when it feels like the world is disposing of them in a way”. 

Film is something Perth-based professional photographer Jenna Elson is looking to experiment with more in her studio portraiture.  The 24 year old turned her creative practice into a profession four years ago when friends at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) wanted their photos taken. Now, she’s a full-time music photographer, specialising in live performance and studio photography, shooting both digitally and analog.

“I had a lot of people ask for film shoots when I was starting out but the more I was shooting in studio I found myself using film less because I really enjoy using strobe lighting and my Minolta SRT doesn’t support it,” Elson says. “That being said, I see myself wanting to shoot more film lately. I just tried it in the studio for the first time last month with constant lighting instead and I loved the result.” 

Elson, who always takes her film camera on holiday, hopes film always has a space within the industry but finds it under-utilised in her projects back home. A lot of clients desire the film look but often don’t want to pay the higher cost for film.

In 2023, Kodak raised the global supplier cost an average 17 per cent on all film and its distributor Alaris announced more increases earlier this year, upwards of eight per cent across the board. It’s not just Kodak either. The average dealer price of film across all major brands has increased from just over $A15 a roll to $A24.67 since the turn of the decade. For creatives like Elson trying to make a living in an unregulated market, and often operating on very low retail margins, it means consumers have to take the hit when buying stock.

With manufacturing facility numbers decreasing worldwide, certain film-making equipment no longer being produced and environmental risks and production costs continuing to rise for manufacturers, the price of film is likely continue to grow.

Adjusting focus

It’s not enough to put off analog shooters quite yet though, according to Focus Pocus film lab founder Chris Beecroft. The Perth creative started developing his own photos at home out of curiosity in 2016, longing to be more involved in the creative decision making behind processing and presenting his own analog pictures.

Soon friends were asking the then 24 year old to process their rolls, too. To provide more options in the area, Beecroft started a film lab out of his share house in Melville. His now Fremantle-based Focus Pocus, celebrates five years of operation this month. 

Hundreds of rolls are dropped off in the letterbox each week and collected by the team of four. Categorised, labelled and organised, each goes through a Noritsu QSF-V30 processor that outputs clean, dry, developed rolls to be hung up. One by one, each strip goes through the Noritsu S-600 film scanner and the photos are digitised, collated and sent back to their owners. 

“We’re in an exciting space where photography is attracting more and more people from all sorts of places, and collectively, regardless of what tools are being used, photography is moving forward and the culture keeps evolving,” Beecroft says. 

Film maker Ilford’s 2018 global photography survey showed just under a quarter of people shooting on film had never used the medium before, many of them under 40. Beecroft says the lab gets new faces and curious first-time shooters all the time, and regularly one-off customers who pick up a disposable camera on holiday.

“I think film labs like mine are hugely privileged in helping a large amount of photographers along that journey in any way we can,” he says. 

The creative takes pride in using the lab to build community, sharing customers’ photos on Focus Pocus’s Instagram page and writing member spotlight feature stories for the website. 

“Our business is not only film processing, but providing a platform and experiences for photographers to share their work and be a part of something,” Beecroft says.

While some are infatuated by the technology, Beecroft is also capitalising on the obsession with the film aesthetic. He has started Grainmaker, a small business selling emulation software that allows users to make their digital photos look like film. 

Customers buy downloadable assets featuring various grain structures, light leaks and film burns, time imprints, film borders and other experimental artefacts like water damage, extracted from real Focus Pocus processed film rolls, which can be placed onto digital photos in Adobe Photoshop.  

“I’ve shot on both digital and film over the last 15 years, and typically want my digital photos to feel as much like film as possible,” Beecroft says. And he’s far from the only one. 

Despite still releasing its own stock, Fujifilm’s new line of X-series cameras feature built-in film simulation modes that aim to emulate analog film stocks digitally from within the camera. Online tutorials for film emulation in their thousands grace platforms like YouTube, where filmmakers and creatives like Beecroft also sell easily accessible and intuitive, often beginner-level courses or physical equipment to modulate digitally shot photo and video and embrace the film look. 

Alexander Payne’s 2023 Best Picture-nominated The Holdovers is shot entirely on the Arri Alexa Mini and manipulated in post to look, as cinematographer Eigil Bryld noted, like it had been found in 35mm cans in someone’s garage 50 years prior. 

It’s an obscure form of resilience indicative of the cultural hold these analog technologies continue to have long after their necessity. For University of Sussex Business School Professor Michael Beverland, emulation fits into the desire to stand out for those who see themselves as innovators online, while allowing followers to fit in with a trend.

Beverland has spent the past decade examining the revival of analog technology and believes nostalgia isn’t the main reason consumers are reaching for analog technology and experiences.

The desire to slow down, escape and disconnect from the digital, as well as the tangibility of analog, is the best explanation for a resurgence driven by those who never experienced the dominance of the technology. The Brighton-based academic says the limitations of analog, and being able to overcome them, are beneficial to art creation, which is why certain users prefer it. 

“It’s about the search for agency or self-authorship in a world where even consumption experiences are typically smooth, easy and well designed,” Beverland says. “You can’t just spray and play as they say with pointing your phone and pressing click.” 

Through a wider lens

Film isn’t the only medium where the younger generations crave the analog experience. Gen Z’s passion for the tactile is a major force behind the resurgence of vinyl, according to Beverland. 

The Recording Industry of America’s annual report reveals the number of vinyl sales rose for the 18th straight year last year, while statistics from the Australian Recording Industry Association show Australian’s are flocking to vinyl at a similar rate. The number of vinyl sales in Australia nearly tripled from 2013 to 2016 and then nearly doubled in the last eight years. These figures do not include massive collector and secondhand markets.

“When you stream, it’s more background and Spotify even sell that as the core benefit – for people who just like music as background – whereas vinyl demands to be appreciated, listened to and engaged,” Beverland says. 

While younger Australians never lived through a time reliant on a small needle moving through grooves to listen to their favourite artist or soaking film in developer to capture a moment, social media and the internet are giving those interested in the technology access to times gone by. 

Beverland believes vicarious nostalgia allows new generations to engage with old technology and the recent past, with visual arts the beneficiary. 

“Take Stranger Things as an example, which has not only seen Kate Bush go back to number one but breathed new life into Polaroid and resulted in tie-ins from the revived brand. Similarly, Kodak has enjoyed success with a keychain camera that looks like it came straight from the 1980s,” he says. 

Analog film technologies such as VistaVision are making a dramatic comeback in Hollywood for the first time since the 1960s. Brady Corbet’s 2024 film The Brutalist was the first in decades to be shot entirely in VistaVision — the film winning the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Lanthimos’ Bugonia added to the growing list of VistaVision-shot films this year, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s new release, One Battle After Another, the latest film spurring its resurgence. 

Ryan Coogler’s culturally revered Sinners was filmed in Ultra Panavision, an analog innovation that also faded out in the 1960s, while Denis Villeneuve’s instalments in the Dune saga were shot in 70mm IMAX. Christopher Nolan will do the same for his next film, The Odyssey. The director’s past four films — Oppenheimer, Tenet, Dunkirk and Interstellar — were all shot using various combinations of Kodak 65mm film. 

The revival and experimentation of analog technologies in the film industry are in part about the survival of the theatre experience, according to Beverland. He says the filmmaking practices represent the desire to make film a spectacle worthy of leaving home for, spending money to watch it in the cinema rather than on a phone or streaming service. 

“I went up to London to view One Battle After Another at the large BFI IMAX because it was on VistaVision. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it looks different to the digital and I’m unlikely to ever check, but it did look great and it meant I spent £27 for a ticket rather than use a freebie at the local theatre with a digital release. 

“The desire for meaning in our activities never goes away. People are looking for meaning in older technology that puts them back in the frame and the more they engage in the work required by analog technologies, the more control they gain in shaping their desired experience.”