Written by Kianna Best on Mar 9, 2023. Posted in General Interest

From the Silver Screen brings style and sustainability

Last month’s British Society of Cinematographers Expo saw a display of the most high quality and boundary pushing innovations in film technology. Amongst the lenses and lights, From the Silver Screen brought something out of the ordinary. Taking the silver by-product from film production, From the Silver Screen creates luxury jewellery pieces. Situated at Cinelab’s stand, their development partner, the luxury jewellery company with a niche was sharing their ode to classic film making. I had the chance to talk with founders Claire Richardson and Natalie Daniels about what From the Silver Screen means for sentimental cinephile.

 

 

Where did From the Silver Screen  come from?

Natalie: It started a long time ago. The initial idea came maybe four or five years ago when we were on a lab tour at Kodak, and someone on our tour, literally when it came to the silver reclaiming session said ‘what happens to the silver?’. They just responded with ‘oh it just goes to London, Hatton Garden and gets refined and goes back into the silver trade. And I was like, WHAT! No one does anything with this? So Claire and I had a conversation afterwards and we were just like we have to do something. But we were so busy with our day jobs and Kodak are a huge organisation so you have to go through a lot of hoops to sometimes even just get a conversation. But then the pandemic hit and were both furloughed, so I contacted Claire and said, we should do this. We first reached out to Kodak but they just said they couldn’t realistically do it, but they had a company that we could reach out to. So we reached out to Cinelab and we spoke to Adrian, the CEO, and they were totally on board and ever since then, they’ve basically become our partner.

 

How are you taking on sustainability with your products?

Claire: So what would happen to the silver is that it would still be collected and refined. Film labs have been doing that for a long time and getting the money back form that silver. But for us, it was so sad this this metal goes into something where people are completely unaware of this special provenance. And that was the thing for us. We wanted to do something with that silver celebrates its origins because it’s so unique. Yes, silver itself is a precious metal, sure, but this for us, we were like for so many people like ourselves, and like the people we work with everyday who love film, who work in film, this is extra special.

 

“All UK sourced and fully recyclable materials are used for our packaging”

 

Why did you choose to create a luxury brand?

Claire: Honestly, for us the opportunities are endless. We are happy to go in different directions like if people want bespoke they can send in one off ideas where it can be as small or as big as they like. But as the main kind of focus for the beginning, we really thought, when you think of film, it does have a certain elegance with it. Simply for us, the idea of this precious metal, and film being beautiful and art, like jewellery and fashion, it was just a nice coming together and synergy between all of those ideas. So for us, luxury jewellery just seemed like an obvious place to start.

 

Natalie: A lot of these pieces are ones that people can wear everyday, so I feel like if we went so on the nose and made a film strip or a clapper board or a director’s chair, it would feel a bit novelty, so we wanted to stay away from that.

 

 

What is next for the brand?

Natalie: So there are three stages to the company on the jewellery side. At the moment we are at the public collection stage, then  we want to do bespoke, maybe even cast and crew gifting and then we want to hit the ultimate goal of connecting the jewellery to a film. For me if I can name films, the dream would be to work with a franchise like James Bond. They tend to shoot on film, there’s a lot of silver which would then come from that production and we can make a very elite small range that would have the silver from that film in it. We also have For the Silver Screen which is a biannual screening that we have in London where we screen films that are shot on film. Claire and I thought, how can we connect the filmmaking community that want to shoot on film to an audience and to our product, and how do we create this full circle of people shooting on film and we make jewellery from it and then we show that film. We also have our film initiative called Processing tank where we have partnered with Cinelab, Arri and Kodak which helps with the funding that is needed for working with film.

 

 

Images courtesy of From the Silver Screen and David Lineton Photography Ltd.

 

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