I do believe that Harry Callahan has taken his cinematic alter-ego to heart.
And for what it is worth, from someone who is interested in this topic but unwilling to argue about it, all of this is pointless and irritating.
If you want to continue, how about moving this to a "Conversation", which was better described as a series of hopefully private message.
I have no problem moving our conversation to private message; i just wanted to clarify about what the campaign etc. really was about - and as Berri did made some claims in this thread i needed to clarify here. But it seems like Berri is back to the facts, so our conversation appears to be finished.
But as this thread is about Ferrania and some people having questions or something to contribute, i´m moving on to jonasfj.
Regardless of the discussions and that it seems to be an emotional subject, I would like to return to what we know and what we do not know.
From reading the available information on the Film Ferrania site, I conclude the following (as close to facts as it gets):
1. The P30 alpha was made on the R&D coater (Little Boy). The film base was triacetate that they had in store and slit into mini jumbos. The chemistry was mixed in very small batches and they eventually retrieved an 30 liter tank from storage (it is not clear if this was ever used in production). According to David Bias, all the equipment that was purchased for the Kickstarter money is still in storage and they do not have the funding to install it.
2. The conclusion from the above is that Film Ferrania run out of money and they need to find new financing to continue their efforts. The critical question: How difficult is it to find a financer who see an upside in this project. Unless they do, it would be game over, right?
3. They claim to have a capacity of 3,000 rolls per week in the current setup and they claim(ed) to be in production. Thus they should have produced around 80,000 rolls after finishing the shipments from the first orders. We have not seen any of those or had any information of new problems
4. According to the Italian article, Film Ferrania is now doing R&D and production of film to detect nuclear radiation. I think it is reasonable to believe this is true, since who would make something like that up?
5. There has been no news on the website since Aug 2017
Now an opinion: There is something going on that they are not fully transparent about
Regarding...
1. They also lost some money due all the delays they had to face - the initial plan surely was to have some money left to be able to put some machines back into working condition.
2. They don´t really need a new investor to move on as the demand of P30 was insanely high. I think Dave said that they sold volume considered to last for 4 months within 5 day. For easier calculating let´s assume one month has 30 days, so 4x30d.= 120days, 120 days volume sold within 5 days is 120d./5d.= factor 24.
Demand of P30 was factor 24 higher than expected and that´s rather a miracle than dumb luck - as the market for B&W is rather saturated than starving.
Even if demand should go down again, let´s say from factor 24 to factor 4 or 3, this still should give them some income and therefore (some) independece from the need of an investor. Therefore i don´t see a game over right now.
3. As they intended to expand capacity by installing a 30 liter tank, it might be possible that they weren´t producing P30 all the time up to now. As a 30 liter tank surely would expand volume of coatable liquid(s), but the question is whether this would harmonize to the capacity of the base material the coater can take up in one run. It could be possible that the coater is able to take up base material needing like 15 liters, but no more than that. Therfore, to have benefit from a 30 liter tank, they had to expand the base-capacity of the coater too - which they planned to do so after the rewards were produced in 2014.
The initial idea was to produce the rewards on the coater being unmodified, then to expand the capacitiy of the coater and move on. Now as the rewards weren´t possible to be made but demand of P30 being 24 higher than expected, they may have decided to expand the base- and liquid-capacity of the coater to be able to meet demand of P30 - and this could mean that they weren´t able to produce P30 all the time up to now, as the coater probably had to stand still during expanding base-capacity. So we can´t be really sure on the 80,000-rolls-number.
The last new problems were said to be in the finishing line.
4. As i don´t speak italian i have to relate to what Berri said and he said that "
which is clearly sayng that Ferrania has projected a special nuclear film for the Gran Sasso Laboratory, although It isn't clear wheter it is refering to old Ferrania, or new Ferrania." So we still don´t know whether this was a flashback, to what Ferrania once was producing, or whether this is happening right now. To your question: " since who would make something like that up?" i could ask why some make up that the kickstater-campaign was for color film only. As lot of journalists also take their information from the internet, its well possible that the author did a sloppy research due to having not enough time, found some old information and just added it to his article - as he wanted to be able to say something about Ferrania. To put Ferrania into perspective meaning to say "look, they do/did proffesional stuff, sience and so on". And i think Berri said that this article was from a local newspaper. Now i don´t wanna look down on local newspapers, but it´s not the New York Times having to loose a reputation due to having spread missinformation. And local newspapers usually don´t make that much money, therefore not being able to afford star-reporters - and a quick search on the internet for a small article is so easy and quick...
Therefore one should be carefull what one does belive; but even if you still belive it, we still don´t know if it´s true or not.
5. To be precise there was a kickstarter-update released on sept. 5., i don´t know if you know about it.
Dead Link Removed
About the opinion it must be: There
might be something going on they
may not be fully transparent about - as we still don´t know whether atomic film is a fact from the past or now.
But even
if there
was something going on they
were not fully transparent about, i don´t think this would be a huge problem. As the money was to save the machines and built a factory with to produce some E6 as rewards, i´m not sure whether Ferrania is bound to tell the backers everything they are doing. As the salvation of the machines was the main goal, they shouldn´t be bound to now tell everything they are doing with those machines. As long as they struggle to stay alive, as they intend to built a succesfull factory, and as long as they keep the backers informed about progess of color film it should be fine.
To put it extreme, i think no one is expecting them to still post updates in 10 years future time, telling the backers that they intent to replace some old windows at their building or that they had to increase their parking lot because cars need bigger parking lots in 10 years future time.
But as there seem to be no news to tell they were quiet since sept. 5. . And as some did complain about timelines not being sticked to, deadlines being withdrawn, they now only "tune in" when something certain can be told. And as some even called them a fraud in the comments on their side, well, they might not be too ambitious any more to again fight some not understanding or not remembering the goal of the campaign.
Which also is why i try to get this thread back to the facts to have a nicer atmosphere again - as it used to be before distrust and pessimism crawled in.
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