The Digital Transition - Text
The Aaton company was founded in 1971, at a time when the photochemical paradigm largely dominated film creation. Yet from the business’s earliest years, Jean-Pierre Beauviala demonstrated that he was very concerned with the contributions of electronics and video. In one sense, all analogue Aaton cameras could be seen as a hybrid devices which in the end owe as much to electronics as to mechanical and photochemical technology.
Aaton equipment was never entirely mechanical- and photochemical-based; it was, rather, always a part of a constantly unfolding transition process. To design movie cameras is to adapt to the constant transformations taking place in the technological environment, which do not occur as a series of clearly identified breaks but rather as part of a complex process taking place over the long term. The transition to digital technology would both accelerate and radicalize this technological process.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the entire film manufacturing and dissemination chain began a rapid transition from analogue technologies – analogue and video – to digital technology. Just the same, Aaton did not want to abandon designing film-based cameras. For Beauviala, the image produced by digital sensors was qualitatively much inferior to that of photochemical film.[1] Unlike video and electronic images, which had always interested Aaton, digital images, at the time, were not seen as up to the task.
Jean-Pierre Beauviala’s idea was thus to develop a camera which would reconcile the necessary adaptation to the changes taking place in the technological environment with his desire to remain faithful to cinema’s traditional physical base, and to provide continuity. Aaton sought another way to negotiate the digital turn than simply by replacing one technology for another. Beauviala did not want to abandon photochemical film, at the same time as he could not allow himself commercially to ignore the profound changes underway. Thus users would be able to choose, with the same camera, which technology best suited different situations. This hybrid quality would lie in the design of digital magazines containing the storage medium and the sensor, compatible with the camera body. The user could thus easily alternate between shooting on film, by inserting a standard 35 mm magazine, or digitally, by opting for a digital back comprising a magazine and a sensor.[2]
The goal was to create a device which would use both film stock and digital technology as a transition between them without favouring one or the other. The user was not obliged to choose definitively when making the purchase and reserved the possibility of alternating between them as desired. Beauviala’s idea was thus to join both technologies in the same camera, proceeding in the end in an additive manner, by bringing the two technologies together. Starting out from the work carried out for the model Aaton 35-III, the company conceived the Pénélope camera. This device, introduced to the market in 2008, nevertheless existed commercially only in 35 mm. Digital magazines equipped with their own sensor which could be inserted directly into the body were never designed in this form. The project of a hybrid camera took the concrete form of a new prototype, distinct from the Pénélope 35 mm put on the market, despite the fact that the two devices had much in common. This hybrid Pénélope would never reach the stage of production for the market.
In early 2012 Aaton announced it was abandoning the hybrid Pénélope in favour of developing a new camera model, this time solely digital: the Pénélope Delta. Although this prototype, introduced to the public in September 2012, once again took the shape of the Pénélope 35 mm, the way in which the hybrid use of film stock and digital technology had changed radically. Rather than refusing to choose between the two as had been the case until now, the idea behind the Pénélope Delta was to provide a digital image with some of the qualities of silver gelatin images which Beauviala saw as having been lost in the shift from one technological paradigm to another. The hybrid quality was thus to be found within the image, seen as lying between the two technologies – as their synthesis and not their addition.
Concretely, in order to carry out this merger of technologies, Aaton had designed a digital sensor which created a random gap between each recorded photogram of a distance equivalent to a half pixel.[3] The goal was to simulate a shot taken on film stock, in which the arrangement of the silver crystals on each exposed surface is never the same. For Beauviala, reintroducing randomness at the moment of recording the image was a way of giving a kind of warmth back to the image, which in his view was lost because of the fixity of digital sensors.[4] This Pénélope Delta was never marketed, as the research and development costs of the prototype brought about the bankruptcy and then sale of the company. These three cameras, two of which did not get beyond the prototype stage, were the last cameras to be designed by the Aaton company.