BSC Expo 2026

Whoever came up with the idea of opening this year’s Expo on the ominous date of Friday the 13th certainly had nerves of steel, since superstition runs like a long traditional thread through cinema history. The classic monster movie King Kong from 1933 is 14 reels long because in the first edit they discovered that it ran 13 reels, and to release it that way was unthinkable, so either cut it down or shoot some more. Filmmakers Schoedsack and Cooper knew they had a hit on their hands and so decided to shoot the famous scene where King Kong smashes a subway car in New York City. 

But if the ominous opening date makes you nervous, you can always try to attend the VIP opening the day before, and I can’t say  it’s becoming a tradition, because I’ve only done it twice, but starting out “the BSC experience” at the pre-BSC VIP open house at CVP on Great Titchfield Street certainly feels like one in the making. It is, quite simply, a great idea, and a good thing about CVP is they have several such showrooms in London and Europe. So should you have missed this particular event, or you’re just curious, you can always explore the latest technology and get expert advice by visiting one of them.

I find the stunning Fitzrovia showroom is brimming with guests and equipment, and bump into Aaron “Bad Boy” George – famous for nearly wrecking the mezzanine floor of the BSC Expo some years ago (though not alone, I hasten to add!). I ask Aaron for a quick update on the situation, and Mark Szeliga, Sales Director at CVP, also shares his perspective.

The message is ultimately a hopeful one: there is work, and there is demand for equipment – it’s just not always in the places we’ve traditionally expected to find it.

“The BSC Expo provides us with a fantastic platform to reconnect with customers and old friends,” Mark explains, “and enables us to understand how we can best support both new and existing opportunities. Across the three days, we’ll focus on supporting our legacy customer base while also engaging with a new, non-traditional audience, showcasing our technical expertise and value-added services across a wide range of areas. Traditionally, CVP’s core customers have come from production, rental houses, broadcast, film, and television. We understand the challenges facing the traditional cine market and remain committed to strengthening the relationships we’ve built over many years.

At the same time, significant opportunities are emerging elsewhere. Large corporations that once outsourced content creation are increasingly bringing production in-house, building their own studios to improve quality control and cost efficiency. Many experienced professionals from the traditional industry are moving into this space, bringing deep technical expertise with them – creating new opportunities not only for work, but also for equipment and workflow solutions.”

Is Kurosawa a greater genius than Orson Welles? Is Cameron’s ”Aliens” better than Scott’s ”Alien”? 

The double-decker bus ride from CVP to the Expo in Battersea Park is not to be missed, one feels a bit like a school kid on a field day trip. Everyone is chatting away merrily and needless to say every conversation is about movies. One gentleman has even brought along a trumpet and plays ”The Simpsons” theme song to cheer us up. 

Finally we arrive at the Battersea Pavilion, in a torrential downpour! True to tradition there’s a forest of trucks, cranes and lighting equipment in front of the Expo entrance, and the lights really get to demonstrate their IP66 certification in the tremendous rain.

At CVP we already found out there’s hope for our industry, a light at the end of the tunnel, we all just need to be a bit resourceful to make it happen.   But what can be said about this year’s BSC Expo? What’s new, what are the trends? Let’s find out!

Ever since the Nanlux Evoke 5000B began shipping just under a year ago, this powerhouse of a bi-color LED spotlight has been very well received and put to good use on a lot of big projects, so Risa Zhu in the Nanlux booth has every reason to be smiling. But when we strike up a conversation, she prefers to highlight the company’s other brand, Nanlite.

The Nanlite PavoSlim series have been around about three years now, and has made a name for itself as an ultra-thin, lightweight, and durable Bi-color panel LED light. Originally launched in a handful of sizes, Nanlite keep adding to the series and the latest addition is the Nanlite PavoSlim 4×2. The PavoSlim lights are selling very well and can be seen in the background in the above photo.

And if you’ll remember, last year Easyrig opened up towards a whole new category of customers thanks to the company’s Easyrig Boom Rig for boom operators, and also during 2025, they released the Vario 6 camera support system. Their brand new product, demonstrated here at the Expo, is a support arm called STABIL Medium, which has been specifically developed for the Vario 6 system.

Pontus Jonsson, Head of Operations at Easyrig AB, is here to present it to us. ”So the STABIL Medium is a close relative to the STABIL Light arm, but with some very important upgrades”, Pontus explains.  ”We’ve added a stronger coil spring and somewhat thicker plates, which means the arm can now stabilize cameras weighing between four up to fourteen kilos. We also decided to put the Vario 6 out there at a more competitive price than the Vario 5 because we know right now in today’s market, not everyone has ready cash, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that as many people as possible can afford the Vario 6. And the four to fourteen kilo capacity means that it can easily handle many popular cameras that are already out there”.

Across the room from Astera along the left-hand wall when you enter the exhibition, we find their friendly competitors and fellow lighting specialists, in the One Stop/K5600 booth, a solid French stronghold if ever there was one. And I don’t know about you dear reader, but when I was a kid, Lego bricks was one of my favorite things in the world, a background I suspect I share with Marc Galerne and his One Stop-colleagues. How else could they have come up with this brilliant idea of the C-Box, basically a giant size Lego for grown-ups! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? We’re used to having apple boxes, camera risers, make-up tables and so on, and they’re always a particular size and not necessarily the one you want. But with this new invention, you just build what you want to suit your needs for any given situation! Clearly these guys were ”thinking outside the box” when they came up with this! 

Stepping outside the Expo for a bit of cool evening air, I have a chat with Paul Bickers, who is something of a legend in the industry for his many custom vehicle builds, such as the PANAVIPER self-ambulating telescopic crane, camera cars, motorcycles etc. Paul, his family and his associates, are actually celebrating the 50th anniversary of their company this year, and they have a number of exciting new vehicles on display here at the Expo. The family business was founded by Paul’s father Dave Bickers, who was one of the premier stunt drivers of his day and therefore frequently called upon to double for cast members in dangerous situations. Our conversation went something like this. 

”So Paul, could you tell us a bit about the 50th anniversary of your company and also the two amazing new electric vehicles you have here on display”. 

”Yeah, it’s our 50th anniversary,” Paul smiles, ”from when my father started our work and my father was a professional motocross scramble rider in the 60s and then he got invited to ride a motorcycle on a movie and that was the start of the company then for him then to be a stunt rider for a few years. And then he started building equipment and making things to help the industry, and he worked on a lot of the earlier James Bond films. So we were working on both ’Octopussy’ and ’Never Say Never Again’ at the same time in the early eighties, and my father had to be really careful not to mention he was working on either of the two movies, because ’Never Say Never Again’ was not really an official Bond movie.” 

”But it looked great,” we remember, ”shot by the legendary Douglas Slocombe BSC OBE, no less. And your company has expanded a lot, I mean, a lot of vehicles?” 

”We have, yeah, every year we try to build new vehicles,” Paul describes, ”I mean, there’s only a certain amount of work for us in our industry, but if there’s a gap, we try to fill it with building new equipment. And we’re going more electric now, we’ve got six electric small tracking vehicles, including one full-size tracking car and two electric motorbikes. They start out as regular motorcycles, then we do the conversion work to make them camera-friendly. Equipment-wise it’s good because it’s smooth and quiet and good for the environment. The electric truck is a new build for us, so it’s a bit of an experiment, really, but it’s good for doing a lot of horse carriage-type work and when you need silent shots and stuff like that.” 

”And being electric,” we  chime in, ”maybe that could be good for anywhere where exhaust or sound would be a problem? Like indoors in a big studio?”

”Yeah, perfect for that, yeah,” Paul confirms with a smile, and asks me if I would like a copy of beautiful biography about Dave Bickers’ life, written by Ian Berry and published in 2023, which I naturally gratefully accept. We shake hands and I head back into the Battersea evolution building.

One of the first things to catch my eye is that Sony have what basically looks like a very expensive piece of charcoal, with a lens and a monitor attached to it, on a pedestal in their booth…   The backstory is, a camera-truck full of equipment caught fire, and this particular camera became very badly burnt. Just out of curiosity Sony checked out if it was still working and it turns out it still produces flawless pictures! And so they decided to showcase it at the Expo as testament to the ruggedness of the camera’s design. After all, perhaps for a Sony VENICE, this kind of exercise is just a warm-up? (Oh I know, I shouldn’t have…)

In the KODAK booth, it’s strictly standing-room only, as it is packed with people and beautiful analog cameras, including a 65 mm high speed prism camera! And I don’t know how fireproof traditional motion picture cameras are, but one venerable classic version, which I have personally seen fall flat on a rock surface and still continue to work flawlessly, is the ARRI 16BL. 

There is an absolutely pristine specimen on display here, and I have a chat with Ross Yeandle from the company Shot on Film, who is an expert on these cameras. 

”What we at Shot on Film do, is we’re trying to get people to use the older 16mm Arriflex cameras,” Ross clarifies, ”because they’re very beautifully engineered, very, very reliable cameras. They do have some electronic circuitry, but it’s much simpler than the later SR range, where the electronics is more complicated and expensive if it goes wrong. The BLs and the STs and all of the older Arri cameras are very, very reliable. We can repair and refurbish them to the point where they are like new. We look at it like renovating a classic car, basically.

But the other thing we’ve found is that the casting and the general build quality of for example the 35C is, wellI would say you can tell it’s an older camera design than the 16mm, which are truly precision instruments. The 16s are an absolutely beautifully made camera. They’re amazing, wonderful engineering. 

So we have a small fleet of cameras that we rent out, and when we do, we can come out with a camera for not a lot of money, pricing it so that it’s more the camera hire, and then that way I load the camera and help on set with someone operating the camera. That way if anyone gets any problems, they’re not scratching their heads while everyone’s standing around waiting.”

Without a decent film lab, the use of traditional motion picture cameras is obviously somewhat restricted, so the obvious next stop is to check out what’s going on at Cinelab -and who better suited to lay it all out than their CEO Adrian Bull?

”2025 was busy for us,” Adrian leads off, ”and this year there’s quite a lot in the pipeline, but winter is usually slow because a lot of productions aren’t shooting. But we’re doing lots of deliverables now, like 35mm prints. The exhibition space is really challenged in that independent cinemas are struggling to get audiences into theaters, but there’s been a really good revival of people wanting to see 35mm prints, to the point that even productions shot on digital will sometimes want film prints for distribution, using our DFD process. And people will go and seek out these releases, since it’s a different experience. 

So  it’s a busy start to the year with releases like ”Wuthering Heights”, directed by Emerald Fennell, and shot by Linus Sandgren ASC FSF on film, and quite a lot of it in VistaVision as well. And it looks really, really lovely. That gets released now on Valentine’s Day. Another project, ”Bugonia” with Robbie Ryan BSC and Yorgos Lanthimos, shot VistaVision pretty much exclusively. We did ”Die, My Love” with Seamus McGarvey ASC BSC and the majority of that film was shot on Ektachrome. Looks very, very distinctive and different, great, great look to it. And again, created a lot of interest. A lot of people have talked to us about exactly what was done for that film.”

We find out that another kind of popular deliverable is doing YCM masters for studios, protection stuff to put in the vault, since film is a really great format for long-term archival purposes. ”Yeah a YCM is the sort of holy grail for it,” Adrian agrees, ”especially if you consider having it on hard drives and migrating it every three years. A YCM can realistically last hundreds of years.” 

”Another aspect of film which we’re talking quite a lot to people about now,” he reflects, ”is just the unique sort of permanent, immutable nature of film. There’s a very strong reaction to the whole onslaught of AI-generated content, and film is real evidence and proof of the performance. If you capture it on film, that person definitely did this. For a long time we’ve had people be passionate about the aesthetic of shooting on film, but I think this aspect of it being real is becoming an important point. Now actually from a creative perspective, this is what protects us as actors and as filmmakers.  I think there’s a bit of a movement in trying to make films a happening. You know, when you go see that, you’re watching something that really happened, which takes things up on another level. 

And for the same reason we’re seeing a return to people doing a lot of stuff in camera, since a lot of CGI has aged badly. We’ve just finished Robert Eggers and Jarin Blaschke shooting ”Werwulf”. Shot on film, and again, a lot of stuff in camera. Really, really impressive.”

Almost without exception, vehicles used for capturing driving plates are modifications of existing production cars that happen to be suitably low enough for a reasonable lens height. Brownian Motion, the plate specialists with the catchy motto ”stitch happens!” have put a radical new twist on this situation by introducing the Brownian Lowrider, an ultra-low custom-built plate-catcher vehicle. Company representative Jonte Besvik is here to give us the details.

”So the Brownian Lowrider is our new custom-built vehicle designed to support our new reactive camera stabilization platform”, Jonte explains. ”It’s got a two litre 180 horsepower Ford engine in it, and it allows us to work at a lens height of just one meter. The whole point of scratch building the car is to get it ultra low, there’s nothing out there that will be able to get a lens height that low, which is good for plates simulating most sports cars. And we can also raise our platform all the way up to two meters, and now we’re talking SUV height, saloon height. 

As for turnaround, the VFX supervisors can make their selects from the Stitchbox files we give them on the night of the shoot. After that, we normally ask for like a week to ten days to do the fine stitch, ready for delivery to volume screens or green screens, although we have done a Friday shoot, working over a bank holiday weekend, ready for delivery on the Monday. But that’s about the fastest turnaround possible.”

Just a short, brisk walk across the exhibition, we find the veteran among plate acquisition companies, as Driving Plates have a very interesting set-up on display here. In fact, if you’re pressed for time, and need car plates from downtown New York City or Hong Kong -or just about anywhere in the world- Driving Plates probably already have them in stock, since they  have the world’s largest library of street backgrounds for car scenes, most of it in 4K but since 2023 it’s 6K. 

Company representative Ian Sharples is here to give us the full picture. ”Virtual production is very glamorous,” he admits, ”but about half our work still is green screen or blue screen. If you just have one short scene or a couple of short scenes, it’s probably more cost-effective to go green screen. And if you have a lot of visual effects, if you’re going to add dinosaurs or explosions or someone’s chasing you, then green screen is probably easier.”

The set-up which Driving Plates have on display here is really interesting, so Ian to elaborate a bit on it. ”So right now we have partnered with a company called Mo-Sys, and they’ve developed a system that puts compressed air bellows underneath the car to simulate the bumps in the road, which is one of the things that hampers virtual production in convincing the audience, and in addition to that they have an attachment to the steering wheel which turns the wheel on the corners, so the actors don’t have to remember to turn the corner. The wheel will go around of itself.”

But one obviously major point in visiting the BSC Expo are the many important and fascinating professionals and artists you can run into here. So on the subject of ”Who was there?”, here’s a little selection. 

After three decades at Netflix, Technicolor and Park Road Post, many of you will probably recognize Phil Oatley, who since about three years back is CEO of RePro Stream, a company specializing in live streaming collaboration for production and post-production in movies and television.

”So basically,” Phil explains, ”the biggest bottleneck in production isn’t rendering or logistics, it’s communication. On projects now about 10 different platforms are used to do 10 different things and I think it really irritates filmmakers. Everyone at RePro Stream has a production filmmaking backgrund, like DITs or similar, and the company’s quest is to build a platform that effectively becomes a singular place for crew, producers, content executives etc, to collaborate.”

Lars Petersson FSF