One of the choices we made early on for White Awake was to shoot part of the film on 16mm film. With the mass adoption of digital technologies, this would seem to most a step back, an unnecessary extra cost, but the Sixty Clicks crew firmly believes that film still produces an unrivalled image, despite all the significant advances in digital technology. Not only that, FILMmaking requires a certain intense focus on set that differs from more liberal digital filmmaking.
That said, we’ll be shooting on digital too. The choice to shoot on digital and 16mm is our attempt to create two distinct time periods in the White Awake narrative: present day (digital) and the past (film). It’s all too easy to get bogged down in the technical sides of filmmaking, but we feel going with this unorthodox approach will greatly aid to the mood and feel.
The documentary Side by Side gives a balanced argument for the pros and cons for migration from celluloid to digital formats.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2014338/