Trying ORWO NC500 film - home developed in ECN2 using a Morse G3

ORWO finally made their new 16mm colour stock available. I stumbled across a reduced price sale just before Christmas, and ordered some to use during the year. It arrived in early January. I loaded a 100ft roll into the Bolex for a test. It was a frosty but sunny morning.

Having read a thread about the film on the Cinematography Forum I rated the film at ISO 250, and added an 85 (orange) daylight filter in the holder behind the lens. My meter was set at ISO 160 to take into account the filter.

It was processed in a Morse G3 rewind tank – not optimal, and used Bellini Digi RA4 developer, with a water stop bath, a Ferricyanide bleach (made from powder), and normal black and white fixer. Plenty of washing in between the processing stages. Not having a remjet anti-halation layer is a real plus – having to wipe 100ft of film several times is a real pain.

The results…. The film is very grainy, high contrast, muted, odd colours. Some of this is possibly due to sub-optimal development and basic scanning setup. But a lot is probably the nature of this stock. Another review on Youtube has noted the frame registration isn’t that stable – the film seems ‘wobblier’ than other stock I have tried in the same camera. They also notice colour pulsing with their pro-developed sample.

The Morse tank isn’t known for the even development – and I notice it introduced (probably) chemical fogging around the perforations. As the film has a greenish base, these come up as purple when scanned.

Is it as good as Kodak colour film? No. But it seems to have an interesting character – very grainy, muted colours. Despite the grain, it seems to show quite a lot of detail. I quite like its lo-fi grungy nature. The bright areas seem to come out well, so it might be worth treating it as a 160 or 125 ISO film.

It’ll be interesting experimenting with it more in future.

I did take a second roll with me on the same day, and concentrated on the graffiti on the underpass. The processing was a disaster. It was loaded double-stacked in the 50ft LOMO tank, and developed with the same developer and bleach I used with the first film, added with some older chemistry from a previous colour experiment.

Loading 100ft into the two decks of the LOMO tank was a real pain, and some of the film ended up mis-loaded (it also has to be cut in half). And the chemistry was bad – so the colours such that they were came out really a lot worse than the Morse. :( Should have used fresh chemistry. I didn’t get the same fogging on the perforations as the Morse developed film, though. It’ll be nice to get a proper 100ft spiral tank at some stage. :)

The sound was recorded ‘wild’ on location after running out of film. A synth noodle from my hard drive was added for ‘atmosphere’.