FDTimes celebrates with this 10th Anniversary Edition 73, ready to download for free.

Film and Digital Times Japan Edition 72J is also ready online, and paper copies will be handed out at InterBEE. We are in booth 2407.

The first issue of Film and Digital Times was a 16 page newsletter. The decade that followed was a workflow of words. A TORRENT! New equipment was arriving at ever shorter intervals. When we embarked on the Film and Digital Times expedition, Film was what ran through the cameras on most features and commercials. The Digital part was mainly how you treated the film in post production.

Ten years later, Film in the title has mostly evolved from origination to procedure. It’s still filmmaking and it’s still a film even if it’s being shot with digital cameras. Our 10-Year Edition is a somewhat opinionated, regrettably not all-inclusive, whirlwind ride that tries to summarize the past 10 years in a few pages. It’s a historical timeline of technique, technology, art, and practical production—with a diverse cast of characters and a cavalcade of companies. It’s a fun reunion. And certainly there are things that seemed new, useful, clever or helpful at the time, but look very different from the precipice of today. Notable blunders, historical revisionism, laughable punditry, and egregious errors are noted in italics.

The problem with a retrospective is the selection process. Some things get left out. My apologies to those well-deserving companies, people and products who are missing, not because of design, but simply because of lack of space. Nevertheless, the entire collection of all 72 editions, with everyone included, is ready to read online on the www.fdtimes.com website. And yes, there’s inevitably a sequel.