Labs & gearBy FilmFocus
Labs Around the World: Gelatin Labs (USA)
This is an AI translation of an article originally published in Japanese. If anything reads oddly, the Japanese original is the authoritative version.
Gelatin Labs is a film processing lab in the suburbs of New York in the United States. It was founded in 2018 by father and son Doug Kruger and Ben Kruger.
It started out as a family project to develop film the family had shot themselves, but it gradually grew, and in 2023 it apparently developed the equivalent of 16 miles (25 km) of film. One distinctive thing about the lab is that it has no storefront: it takes orders online, and film arrives by mail from all over the country.
You can get a glimpse of the lab on its YouTube channel. Alongside Noritsu processors and scanners, it also runs a processor from Colenta. Colenta is an Austrian maker of processing equipment, and labs using its machines are apparently rare even in the US.
The lab's name, Gelatin, reportedly comes from gelatin, one of the raw materials used to make film.