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I thought I’d delve a little into the behind the scenes of a personal film I’m working on. I’ve been a type one diabetic for about fifteen years and have become recently obsessed with creating a film about the American medical system. I aim to capture the feeling that the medication that provides you with the ability to exist may one day be taken away, or not covered, or not delivered in time. I deal with the insulin saga every month, and while it may be an extreme example, I think many Americans live in similar situations.
That‘s the context. What I really want to delve into is the process of creating 16mm imagery, from shooting to developing, to editing. This is what our rig looked like when I decided to shoot a few months worth of the disposable needles I use to inject. I wanted to create an in camera “split screen” effect. To do that, I covered three quarters of the image plain and shot through my film. Then, I’d rewind and adjust my matte to expose one of the remaining quarters, doing so until I had a complete image. I’ll go a little more into the film stock when I talk about hand development :)
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I love this. my partner has type 1 and we are always talking about this. would love to see the final project
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Alright here’s a quick look at hand processing 16mm motion picture film. The stock I shot for this film is called Kodak 3378, it’s a high contrast black and white reversal film stock, which basically means it doesn’t develop as a negative but as the actual viewable image. The process of “hand development” is an interesting one. First 100 ft of film are loaded into a light proof tank. The chemical process I used is called E6 and it consists of a few steps that can be performed at room temperature: first developer, second developer, rinse, bleach, fixer, photoflow. Exposing the film to these chemicals four particular times results in the final image. This step is the rinse, the 3378 stock is the slightly purple film.
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