Inside Harman’s Bet on the Future of Analog Photography

Behind-the-scenes videos show how Harman makes film today, from the lab to the production line. The process balances chemistry, engineering, and constant iteration at every stage. Together, the videos reveal a fascinating look into how analog photography continues to evolve in the modern age.

Film photography often gets framed as nostalgic. Old cameras, old processes, old ways of seeing. But step inside Harman Technology, and that idea starts to feel incomplete. What you find instead is a working environment that blends chemistry, engineering, and experimentation in a way that feels active and evolving rather than preserved. Film is not simply being maintained. In many ways, even today, it is still being figured out.

Harman Technology, the company behind Ilford and Kentmere black and white films as well as Harman Photo color films, recently shared a series of videos of its technology factory in Mobberley, UK. As “one of the world’s largest manufacturers of analog photographic films, darkroom papers, and photo chemicals,” the series is both educational and captivating.

It Starts as Chemistry, Not Photography

Before film ever becomes something you load into a camera, it exists as a set of formulations. Light-sensitive emulsions are designed, mixed, and refined in lab environments where small changes can have wide-reaching effects. Black-and-white film relies heavily on silver halide crystals and a controlled structure. Color film introduces an entirely different level of complexity, requiring multiple layers and chemical systems to work together in precise alignment.

“The science of making film is really interesting. The crystallography, the physics of drying, the physics of color science, the chemistry of making couplers,” Harman says.

Each layer in a color film must respond to a different part of the light spectrum, and each layer must remain stable throughout coating, drying, exposure, and processing. There is very little room for improvisation once production begins, which makes the development phase even more critical.

“There are no recipes for what we’re creating. It’s all coming out of the minds of the people in R&D as we speak,” Harman says.

That lack of a fixed blueprint has defined Harman’s recent work in color, including Harman Phoenix 200. Instead of refining an existing formula, the team is effectively building one in real time, testing ideas, discarding what does not work, and gradually shaping something usable.

Coating Film in the Dark

Once the chemistry is ready, it moves out of the lab and into production. This is where film begins to take physical form, and where the process becomes less visible but no less important.

Coating involves applying multiple layers onto a base material under tightly controlled conditions. These layers can include emulsions, filter layers, and protective coatings, all of which need to be applied with extreme precision. Even slight inconsistencies in thickness or adhesion can lead to visible issues later.

“For a color film, we have many layers to render all the different colors, so it’s split up into the color channels, red, blue, and green,” Harman says.

That layered structure is what allows color film to work, but it also introduces complexity at every stage. Each layer must interact correctly with the others, and each must survive the physical stresses of production without introducing defects.

“Making color film is hard,” Harman says.

It is a straightforward assessment, but one that reflects the reality of the process. Compared to black-and-white film, color adds more materials, more variables, and more potential points of failure. That complexity carries through everything that follows.

The Machines Behind the Process

“Film photography is a passion, not just a hobby, for millions of people across the world. Analog cameras and skills have been passed down through generations, and we’re seeing new people fall in love with film photography every day. However, users have limited choice and manufacturers are battling old machinery and processes, and replacement parts that just don’t exist anymore. We’re taking a huge leap to address that with this investment,” says Greg Summers, managing director at Harman Technology.

There is a clear tension running through that statement. On one hand, demand for film is not just stable but growing, carried by new photographers discovering analog for the first time alongside long-time users returning to it. On the other hand, the physical infrastructure that supports that demand has been slowly aging out of relevance. Machines built decades ago remain central to production, often operating far beyond their intended lifespans. In some cases, maintenance depends on parts that are no longer manufactured, which turns everyday repairs into engineering challenges of their own.

“Our hub in Mobberley is going to become a center of photographic excellence, as we aim to pioneer new ways to manufacture, produce and develop film — both black and white and color. It’s now a better time than ever to push resources into our team and build on the market’s momentum. We’re making sure that we have a wealth of young talent that is ready to take the reins from industry veterans, combining their experience with innovative processes to produce and protect the future of film photography,” Summers says.

What sits underneath this is a deliberate shift in how knowledge and production are structured. Film manufacturing has always depended heavily on accumulated expertise, much of it passed down through hands-on experience rather than formal documentation. As the industry modernizes, that knowledge transfer becomes just as important as new equipment. The goal is not only to replace aging machinery, but also to ensure the people operating and developing these systems can continue to evolve them. That combination of experience and new technical input is becoming central to how production is being rethought.

Beyond the chemistry, film production depends heavily on the machinery used to produce it. For much of the industry, that machinery has been aging quietly in the background.

“If we rest on our laurels with equipment that was built in the 1980s, the day would come that that couldn’t happen,” Harman says.

That concern is not abstract. It reflects a very real dependency on systems that were never designed for today’s level of demand or longevity. As production needs increase, the limitations of legacy equipment become more visible, from throughput constraints to maintenance bottlenecks. The risk is not just inefficiency, but eventual inability to scale at all if nothing changes.

“These machines cannot be bought. We’ve had to design them, get them manufactured, put them together, so they really are bespoke,” Harman says.

That line captures the reality of modern film production. There is no off-the-shelf solution for replacing the backbone of the industry. Instead, entire systems have to be re-engineered from the ground up, often combining traditional mechanical principles with contemporary automation and control systems. It is less about upgrading a line and more about rebuilding the logic of how film is physically assembled.

The result is a new generation of finishing lines that handle cutting, slitting, spooling, and assembling film into 35mm cassettes. These systems introduce automation and updated engineering, but they also serve a more basic purpose. They make sure the process can continue.

Scaling Something That Was Never Meant to Scale

As new equipment comes online, production capacity increases. That has implications not just for one company, but for the broader availability of film.

“Not only will the new line more than double our current capacities, we’ve actually built in redundancy into the system,” Harman says.

That idea of redundancy is important in a production environment that has historically had very little flexibility. Film manufacturing was never designed to operate like a rapidly scalable consumer industry. It was built around steady output, long equipment lifecycles, and relatively predictable demand. Building in redundancy changes that logic. It allows for downtime, maintenance, and expansion without interrupting supply in the same way older systems might.

That kind of flexibility matters in a market where demand has been rising while infrastructure has struggled to keep up. By expanding capacity and building in room for further growth, Harman is positioning itself to support both its own products and a wider network of partners.

Across lines like Ilford Photo and Kentmere, the focus shifts from simply producing film to maintaining a stable and scalable supply.

Why Keep Doing This at All

After all the technical details, the question remains. Why continue investing in a medium that many assumed would fade away?

“It’s an art form,” Harman explains simply.

Inside the factory, those ideas translate into tangible work. Layers of emulsion, machines built from scratch, repeated testing cycles. The process is demanding, and often slow, but it continues because the result offers something distinct.

Film is not easy to make, or use. It never has been. But that difficulty and hands-on process from start to finish is exactly what keeps it relevant. It’s art.

Image credits: Harman Technology