Kodak has been hiring some people over the last couple of years. And many of those positions involve the company’s legacy, the film business.
Kodak recently revealed that it has signed long-term contracts to keep supplying motion picture film to the major Hollywood studios, including Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros.
Despite the dominance of digital, a number of well-known directors, including people like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorcese, and J.J. Abrams have been proponents of using film.
That film is mostly made in Rochester, at the Eastman Business Park, and Kodak has been hiring people for those manufacturing operations since 2017, and will be filling a total of more than 200 jobs, with some of the hires happening this year as well.
That’s according to Steve Bellamy, President of Motion Picture and Entertainment for Kodak, who notes that the film manufacturing side of their business has been using the talents of workers who have been around for decades. But eventually they will retire and Bellamy says there’s a transition going on.
“We have a window where those people that have so much institutional knowledge, we’re talking operators, technicians, chemists, engineers, maintenance people; they’re still there to really educate a new kind of future-centric analog workforce,” Bellamy says.
Bellamy notes that the last year has been a big one for film, with movies shot on film representing half of the productions receiving Academy Award nominations in the Best Picture and Cinematography categories, movies like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Little Women and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Film is no longer the major revenue driver for Kodak, but Bellamy says it is still an important brand name product for the company. Kodak mainly focuses now on digital printing and packaging.
