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In the filmmaking business most of his career, Robert Shanebrook said he knows nothing was ever written down, and that at some point in time, people wouldn’t know what had been done.
After retiring from Eastman Kodak seven years ago, Shanebrook set out to make sure people knew the whole story.
The result is a book, “Making Kodak Film: The Illustrated Story of State-of-the-Art Photographic Film Manufacturing” by Shanebrook.
“Kodak didn’t divulge much about the business; most (employees and others) had no idea of the technology that had been built up,” Shanebrook said.
To fill in gaps, he arranged three or four tours of Kodak manufacturing facilities for Eastman House technical staff.
With an “agreement in principle” from Dr. Mary Jane Hellyar, also of Irondequoit, who was Kodak’s vice president in charge of the film business until her retirement last year, Shanebrook began documenting “how things are made.”
In 2005, he was allowed to start visiting Kodak Park and to take pictures. He spent over 40 days there.
“It was unheard of; they gave me full access to the people and assigned me an expert in 15 different areas,” Shanebrook said.
Ronald Andrews, who has a background in film product development and film manufacturing, observed that some of the things Shanebrook photographed could not even be seen by employees until they had worked at Eastman Kodak for five years.
Shanebrook ended up with 165 illustrations made just for the book, 130 photographs and 25 drawings that he incorporated into what he calls his “do-it-yourself-project.”
“I wanted to document the technology piece as a tribute to the people in manufacturing and research,” Shanebrook said, “and for the people who were ‘siloed’ and never had the whole process explained, or understood how they fit into the big picture.”
He calls the finished product “really a picture book with captions.”
Yes, Kodak filmmaking has been a very secretive process and is protected “for good reason,” Shanebrook added, but he doesn’t “give away” any of those secrets in his book.
The book also has only current, not historical, information.
Still, the book does give film conservators, for instance, information that may help them with preservation, since they will understand more about how it was made.
“It’s not just what’s in a roll of film, but how it’s done at each step,” Shanebrook said. “Two hundred chemical compounds are used in a single roll of film.”
In the filmmaking business most of his career, Robert Shanebrook said he knows nothing was ever written down, and that at some point in time, people wouldn’t know what had been done.
After retiring from Eastman Kodak seven years ago, Shanebrook set out to make sure people knew the whole story.
The result is a book, “Making Kodak Film: The Illustrated Story of State-of-the-Art Photographic Film Manufacturing” by Shanebrook.
“Kodak didn’t divulge much about the business; most (employees and others) had no idea of the technology that had been built up,” Shanebrook said.
To fill in gaps, he arranged three or four tours of Kodak manufacturing facilities for Eastman House technical staff.
With an “agreement in principle” from Dr. Mary Jane Hellyar, also of Irondequoit, who was Kodak’s vice president in charge of the film business until her retirement last year, Shanebrook began documenting “how things are made.”
In 2005, he was allowed to start visiting Kodak Park and to take pictures. He spent over 40 days there.
“It was unheard of; they gave me full access to the people and assigned me an expert in 15 different areas,” Shanebrook said.
Ronald Andrews, who has a background in film product development and film manufacturing, observed that some of the things Shanebrook photographed could not even be seen by employees until they had worked at Eastman Kodak for five years.
Shanebrook ended up with 165 illustrations made just for the book, 130 photographs and 25 drawings that he incorporated into what he calls his “do-it-yourself-project.”
“I wanted to document the technology piece as a tribute to the people in manufacturing and research,” Shanebrook said, “and for the people who were ‘siloed’ and never had the whole process explained, or understood how they fit into the big picture.”
He calls the finished product “really a picture book with captions.”
Yes, Kodak filmmaking has been a very secretive process and is protected “for good reason,” Shanebrook added, but he doesn’t “give away” any of those secrets in his book.
The book also has only current, not historical, information.
Still, the book does give film conservators, for instance, information that may help them with preservation, since they will understand more about how it was made.
“It’s not just what’s in a roll of film, but how it’s done at each step,” Shanebrook said. “Two hundred chemical compounds are used in a single roll of film.”
His goal with the book, he said, was simply to have an appreciation of what was done.
“The book doesn't disclose information that will now give competitors an advantage.” Shanebrook stressed. “Rather, the book is a step-by-step overview of how Kodak makes a roll of film. It is not a detailed plan for building a film factory or making your own film. There are no chemical equations or formulas.”
Before this book, however, “this (information) was never written anywhere,” he said, “it was the so-called silver curtain.”
After his manuscript was complete, he sent it to Kodak, where at least 20 legal, corporate security and manufacturing division professionals studied it for more than eight months. Shanebrook said they recommended the removal of two pictures and only about 20 words, then fully agreed it could be published.
“I figure that from the beginning, at least 90 people from Kodak worked on this (book) with me,” Shanebrook said.
The book, which Shanebrook self-published, was released in late summer and in just the first 10 days, was sold in 47 states and 20 different countries through the internet and e-mail.
The project still took far more time than he originally thought it might, Shanebrook acknowledged.
The feedback he has been getting has been positive.
“As you say in one of the last pages, it is incredible that a process of this complexity worked,” wrote one reader from Madrid, Spain.
Fundamentally, the technology is exactly the same, only “perfected,” as it was when George Eastman started the business in 1880, Shanebrook said. “That’s amazing.”
A California photographer wrote that the book “answers a lot of questions.”
“It has the answers to questions I had for ages and nobody could answer, plus lots of stuff I never realized even after reading about this subject for over a decade,” said another photographer from Cincinnati, Ohio.
In his preface, Shanebrook likens filmmaking to a gelatin dessert made using several layers of colored gelatin.
“I wrote it so that you don’t have to be a photographic or chemical engineer to understand it,” Shanebrook said. “Anybody should be able to read it and get a better understanding of how film is made and how it works.”
He’s also careful to caution that the publication of the book certainly doesn’t mean that film has or will “go away.”
“And whether it will (go away) ... Well, I’m not foolish enough to make a forecast on how long it will last,” Shanebrook said. “Film production peaked in 2001, but it’s hanging in there, and today they’re making the best film Kodak has ever made ... They haven’t thrown in the towel by any means.”
As he writes in his book: “It is very easy to make a little yellow box. It is not so easy to put a roll of high quality film inside it.”
And now readers will know the “how.”
