Behind the Film - Inside the ILFORD factory

[interneg]

You have to wonder how they coated film in the old days. Here is Kodak's spooling operation...in the dark with infrared flash.

1945...

It's well documented how materials were coated & the changes from dip to slot-die to slide to cascade coating. Quite a lot is readily accessible via Google if you know the terminology of what you are looking for.

As for the future of film R&D etc, no one seems to have noticed that the R&D scientist in the film is clearly of a younger generation than the senior staff interviewed elsewhere in the film.

[mpirie]

Yeah, good point, and hopefully, she was not the only young person working at Ilford.

Mike

[Jac@stafford.net]

[...] who is going to continue this after some/all these people retire

Why presume there is no apprentice or normal hierarchy in place?

[Kiwi7475]

Why presume there is no apprentice or normal hierarchy in place?

It’s certainly possible, it just didn’t look like the place is bursting with people rather that it’s streamlined to a minimum and it just caught my attention that most (minus one) have been there a long time. Indeed they make it a point of the short to make it look like almost everyone has been there 30 years. They had a chance to show new faces and young people and they didn’t. So one naturally infers from that the proportions shown are that of the full company. It is only normal to extrapolate that way even if indeed you’re of course right that it is just an inference on our side.

[Oren Grad]

Finally got around to watching the video... wow! It brought back memories of the wonderful day back in 2007 when I had the good fortune and great pleasure to participate in the APUG tour of the factory complex in Mobberley.

The video provides some close views of the small coating machine used for R&D, pilot production and quality control, and mentions in passing how much smaller it is than the main coating machine. But what it doesn't make explicit is that the main machine is a city-block long, housed in its own dedicated building.

The roll film packaging machines were very cool, but I have to say that seen "in the flesh", the 120 machine in particular was quite the contraption, like something out of a Rube Goldberg (or should it be Heath Robinson?) cartoon. Many of us couldn't help cracking a smile at the sight of it doing its thing.

As the video highlights roll film production, a couple of aspects of our tour that it doesn't show are cutting and packaging of sheet film and of paper.

The overall impression I took away from our visit was of a facility that was large, clean, under-populated, and well-maintained where it matters but slightly shabby around the margins where it doesn't. From the video I wouldn't be surprised if it's exactly the same today.

The senior managers who met with us in 2007 emphasized the importance of their efforts to re-scale the operation to be sustainable at lower overall volumes. They were clearly quite proud of how they had found ways to be more nimble in switching production among shorter runs of different products in response to market conditions, while still maintaining quality. One other thing comes back to mind: around the factory were placards reminding employees of the Harman Technology company principles. The one that stands out in my recollection today is that they declared their intention to be the "last man standing" in the (film and paper) business. Who knows whether it will work out that way, but so far, at least, they're still here.

About staffing of the factory: by the time of the bankruptcy/reorganization in 2004-5, the employee count in Mobberley was already far smaller than it had been at the peak of production years before. But over the ten years or so following the reorganization, the new Harman Technology company felt compelled to continue shedding employees, primarily manufacturing staff, to get down to a level that's more sustainable given their current volume. Based on the last few annual reports, this seems to have finally stabilized, though we'll see what this year's report looks like when it comes out in a bit. However, at this point they do have a quite small number of people relative to the overall size of the factory complex. The site-redevelopment plan that envisioned them transferring operations to a new facility with a much smaller footprint reflected that.

The question of training young staff to be able to run the coating machines when the old-timers retire came up on the tour in 2007. Although as Randy says, it's not "magic", nevertheless there's a certain amount of voodoo involved in mixing and coating photographic emulsions, tacit knowledge that's site- and machine-dependent, gained from experience and not possible to write down completely in a book. My recollection of the discussion back then was that the Harman managers expressed general confidence that they would be able to cultivate a new generation of coating engineers as needed, but I have no information about what the turnover has been among that unit within their manufacturing staff over the past decade, nor what they have done to bring on trainees for that role.

Finally: for anyone who's interested, there's a nice page on the history of the company and its products here:

https://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/I...hronology.html

Also, I have posted information from the Harman annual reports in this thread:

https://www.largeformatphotography.i...PDATED-TO-2017

EDIT: There's a Photrio thread from 2008 in which someone asked Simon Galley whether it might be possible to make a "video tour" for the many who couldn't visit in person. He said he'd look into it... and here we are at last, eleven years later! Nah, probably not the same project - Simon is long gone from Harman, alas. Still, it's great to see some version of it become reality.

[Oren Grad]

If you enjoyed the Ilford video, you might also like this Kodak feature from 60 years ago. Special thanks to Sal Santamaura for posting about this on APUG ten years ago, and to Denise Ross/The Light Farm for hosting the video:

http://www.thelightfarm.com/cgi-bin/showvideo.py

[Tin Can]

Not loading, my connection is fast.

[Sal Santamaura]

Not loading, my connection is fast.

Works for me.

[Tin Can]

This link works,

http://www.thelightfarm.com/Map/Vide...wvideo_v2.html

[Oren Grad]

Thanks, Randy.

Credit where credit is due, I should also point to this page, which explains the efforts of others who "processed" the feature into a format that could be shared:

http://www.thelightfarm.com/Map/Vide...Made_Intro.htm