8mm Film Workshop

With film being one of my main interests, an extra-curricular project that I really wanted to get involved in was Loop The Loop: exploring my local heritage through film. The workshop I attended at Loop The Loop was about hand-processing 8mm film using household items, including: instant coffee, vitamin C, washing powder, and salt.  This alone I found fascinating, but the experience also allowed us to use the specialised equipment, such as film processing tanks and spirals. 

Following our enthusiasm, Joanna Mayes, artist and filmmaker, decided to take our workshop further than planned and teach us how to use an 8mm camera in order to create our own film that day. This involved using an iPhone app to detect light levels and give us accurate information on the f-stop and aperture we should be using in order to make our film look the best it can be, and then we just filmed as many different things as possible; we focused a lot on motion and how it would look on film. 

At the end of the day, Jo asked us to come along again the next day so that we could hand-process our own film, and this was a really good end to the workshop as it allowed us to showcase what we had learnt by going through the process ourselves, with supervision by Jo, and process and dry our own work. Whilst doing this, we explained the process to other attendees of the project, and fully cemented what we had learnt. 

Overall, the project, I felt, was incredibly interesting, and learning how filmmaking used to be done before everything went digital has inspired me to join the extensive community of people still using old-fashioned film by starting to do this myself in the future. The project as a whole made it into the Cornish Guardian newspaper, and the article featured myself, Joanne Mayes, and Joseph Crowe-Delderfield, a fellow student that attended the workshop.