Pressure Marks

The unthinkable just happened. Over the weekend I got a crew together to shoot 2 super16mm film spec commercials "Vertical Integration" and "Backwards Barbeque" that I'd been planning for a few months. Just now I got a call from the lab telling me that there was a problem with the footage. Evidently, while the film was being processed, a wheel on the line broke and our film jumped a sprocket hole and flipped over. Now there are intermittent blue pressure marks all over the film. I have no idea how bad they are or how often they occur. I'm going to find out in the transfer in a few days, but right now I'm feeling very low. It's the first time in 7 years that I've ever had a problem shooting film and as someone who considers himself a film advocate (in this day of digital takeover) it's a shitty feeling to get a shot of the potential shortcomings of celluloid firsthand. The first thing I thought when I got the message though, was how glad I was that this had happened on a 1-day shoot as opposed to one of my bigger projects. I guess my insurance agent was right—there is an argument for paying for negative insurance after all.