There’s a lot of equipment in the still-under-construction headquarters of Chroma Film Lab but the piece that really catches the eye is a massive stainless-steel box that used to belong to Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson – and which was bought for just one dollar (more on that below).
“I know King Kong was done on this,” says Jordan Dautovic of the FilmLab colour negative processor, which he is still getting into working order with his first big job just weeks away. “They bought it in 2004, so it would have run everything Jackson made between then and 2013. The contact printers definitely would have printed all the dailies [footage screened for the filmmakers at the end of each day of shooting] and possibly even the early release prints for Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
The 35-year-old hasn’t brought these hulking machines to Melbourne as an exercise in nostalgia, though. He is about to launch a dedicated movie film processing facility, the first in Australia since 2013. And the former croupier is taking a huge punt that if he builds it, they will come.
Though digital projection has become the industry standard, there is a growing demand from filmmakers wanting to shoot on celluloid, insists Dautovic. And in Australia the lack of processing facilities has meant they mostly couldn’t.
“Australia really is the last major territory in the world where we make movies and they just can’t be shot on film,” he says.
His business model is predicated on a steady flow of Super 8 and 16mm film stock. That’s the bread and butter; the three to four feature films a year he anticipates handling “is the gravy”.
Dautovic has dabbled in filmmaking since childhood – he used to make stop-motion Lego movies on the family camcorder – but worked the tables at Crown Casino from his early 20s after being knocked back by the Victorian College of the Arts’ film school.
His interest in film was rekindled during lockdown, when he moved back in with his parents and converted their laundry into a lab, where he taught himself how to process and develop colour photographic film.
By 2023, while working with an old hand in Sydney who was turning down film work because he didn’t have the capacity for it, Dautovic got wind of the fact Archives New Zealand was getting rid of its processing equipment – equipment that used to belong to Park Road Post Production, the high-end facility established by Peter Jackson in his home town of Wellington.
He approached them about possibly salvaging the equipment and flew over in October of that year to present his pitch.
“They were interested but kind of apprehensive, like, ‘what are you doing?’,” he says. “I explained that I wanted to set up a new lab and I believed there was enough demand for it, and then they went through the bureaucracy of discharging public assets – ‘how do we do this?’”
The answer: sell it for the same price they’d paid for it, which was one New Zealand dollar (Jackson had effectively donated the equipment to the government agency).
“And 15 cents,” Dautovic clarifies. “I had to pay GST.”
The catch: he’d have to dismantle it and transport it to Australia himself.
It took until mid-2025 before he’d convinced himself there really was enough demand to make this crazy project viable, and convinced the bank to back him with a business loan, and Lance Weeks, a colleague with experience in film equipment, to help him break down the 10 tonnes of gear – including a couple of film-to-digital scanners that cost about $1 million a piece when they were new – and to pack it all into two 40-foot shipping containers before unloading and setting it up again in East Brunswick.
Dautovic has had solid expressions of interest from a number of local feature film directors, including Thomas M. Wright (the Netflix hit film The Stranger) and Robert Connolly (The Dry), and he’s had three demo shorts made as proof of concept, including one shot by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Ari Wegner (“the film’s in my fridge, waiting to be developed,” Dautovic says).
And in four weeks’ time he’s got a firm booking for a major project from a Hollywood producer, a job that is helping get this project over the finishing line.
There have been times, Dautovic admits, when he’s wondered if he was crazy to head down this road – “I’m dumb,” he says, “but I’m not stupid” – but he’s convinced he’ll soon have a viable and much-needed business on his hands, one where the very shortcomings of film become its greatest assets.
“Not to get too philosophical,” he says, “but [shooting on] film doesn’t make a project better, it’s just that what it demands of you means you have really high-quality people working on it.
“You’ve really got to know what you want before you shoot. And I think that intentionality is rewarded.”
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