Wednesday October 4 * 6-10pm

Process film with just plants, ashes, and water. No industrial products, nothing from the store!

Summary: In this plant processing workshop students will learn how to make a plant developer for black and white 16mm film. (Also works for ALL b&w film and photo emulsion, including photo paper emulsion).

This workshop will cover the material history and ingredients of celluloid, what happens during exposure and development, how industrial chemicals were developed over plant based ones and why.

Then, we will learn the ingredients in plant developers that can create the same results as the industrially produced ones. We will learn about how to harvest, when to harvest, and the preparation of the developer in order to achieve the desired results, as well as how to embrace the nature of chance and the destandardization of development. Plant developers are not trying to just mimic their industrial counterparts but are their own wild selves.

We will create the different plant developers together from plants harvested locally and process test strips to compare the differences between plants. Finally we will thread all of our developed samples together and project them with a 16mm film projector on a loop so we can see the final results in motion!