Developing

This dispatch is a collection of notes and half-formed thoughts from the past half-year or so, up to about May. A lot more to say, so a follow-up will arrive relatively quickly (for me) next month.

In March, a group of us were in Barcelona for the second in-person workshop of the Baltic Analog Lab film school. It was at Crater Lab, a small independent film studio with traditional photochemical film equipment in the L'Hospitalet area, where we were being taught how to work with a contact printer by Yago Alcover...

Being completely immersed in printmaking from childhood has meant that my work has this process at its heart; even when I’m working on animations, in the way I think about colour, but also more structurally as an image comprising layers on a surface.

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I just finished delivering a workshop for the Sustainable Darkroom that was kind of along the lines of this letter, called Cinematic Surfaces: Film as Printmaking, an online 3-parter going through different ways you can approach the 16m film strip as a surface, using contact printing, chemigrams, direct animation, handmade processes basically. It sold out in a couple of days, so I didn’t manage to send something to you in time, but I should be doing another one sometime next year I hope, so I’ll definitely keep you posted on that.

I’m very happy to say that my Animate Projects-commissioned film On Hannah Fields has been selected to screen at this year’s Braziers International Film Festival, Aug 29-31st in Oxfordshire. It’s a festival I’ve wanted to be part of for many years, so it’s great to be there at last. Looking forward to joining other filmmakers in the barn screenings and accompanying discussions.

Process Festival will be back in 2027. You can still view the programmes for this year’s film screenings and expanded performances for tips on what to look out for elsewhere. It was easily one of (if not the) best experimental film festivals I’ve attended.

Read more about Crater Lab and Baltic Analog Lab on the Filmlabs.org resource.

Nik Arthur's post on responding to the land is here: https://nikarthur.substack.com/p/characters-of-the-creek