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Something old is new again on wedding days: real analog film. Not a digital filter dressed up to look like film ... actual Super 8mm and 16mm motion-picture film, shot on cameras built decades before anyone owned a phone, processed and scanned by hand. After years of 4K, drones and infinite retakes, more and more couples are asking us for grain again.
The numbers back up what we're seeing on set. Pinterest's 2025 Wedding Trends Report found searches for "film wedding photos" up 2,258 percent year over year, and The Knot's 2025 wedding-video trend coverage named Super 8, blended with digital footage, as one of the year's defining looks. Kodak, meanwhile, reported film stock sales rising roughly 20 percent in 2024 and released a new Super 8 camera that same year ... its first major update to the format in more than three decades.
Grain and warmth are only part of it. Shooting on film removes the infinite-takes safety net of digital: there is no monitor to check mid-scene, no instant replay, just a fixed number of minutes on a roll and a commitment to the moment as it actually happens. For a generation that has already brought disposable cameras back to the reception table, and that reaches for the soft, imperfect look of 90s and 2000s home movies over anything hyper-polished, that constraint feels less like a limitation and more like the entire point.
It is also genuinely rare. A standard 400-foot roll of 16mm holds around eleven minutes of footage at 24 frames per second, must be processed and scanned by a specialist lab in the days after the wedding, and captures no audio on its own ... every roll is a decision, not a default. Very few working wedding videographers own the cameras, know how to load them correctly, or have a lab relationship that can turn a wedding weekend around in time for the final edit. It sits closer to cinematography school than modern content creation.
It's a discipline we've built into the studio rather than treated as a novelty. Michael Bod, part of the Chromata Films team, is our dedicated 16mm film and portrait specialist ... one of the only wedding filmmakers we know of who shoots true analog motion-picture film on real weddings, grain, halation and all, rather than a digital "film-look" preset applied after the fact. It sits alongside our standard cinema coverage, not instead of it: Super 8 and 16mm can't replace a full wedding film on their own (no built-in sound, only a handful of minutes per roll), but as a companion reel, it gives a day a texture that no amount of 4K can fake.
Below are a few frames from recent rolls, shown exactly as they come back from the lab ... unretouched, ungraded, straight off the film.
If you're planning a wedding and want a reel that will look and feel the same in thirty years as it does today, ask us about shooting on film. It won't be for every couple, or every moment of the day ... but for the right few minutes, nothing digital has matched it yet.
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