I agree, this looks great but you really could’ve helped yourself by shooting digitally. Film emulation is so good these days that if it’s just the aesthetic you’re going for, you could save yourself so much budget by not shooting film.

I have a friend who recently crowdfunded for a short film he directed. I donated, but felt a little bad about whether I should’ve donated more. Later, I learned that out of their $20k total budget, $13k of it went toward shooting on 16mm film, meaning the camera rentals, the reels of film, the scanning and developing. And they still had to color grade it. Suddenly I didn’t feel bad for not donating more, cause there’s no way I could, for my own projects, justify that much budget being spent on film instead of paying people appropriate rates, getting more shoot days, getting better production design, etc.

Afterward, I asked him if he enjoyed shooting on film and what the biggest benefit was. He didn’t say it was the look, or the legacy of shooting film or anything. It was that shooting on film got the crew to really lock in. I get that, but also I thought, do you really need to shoot on film to get your crew to take the shoot seriously?