I’ve had an amazing day today at Nanolab in Daylesford, Victoria, taking part in a workshop where we made rayograms (photograms) onto 16mm film.

As I already use animated paper photogram sequences in my film work, this is a really exciting opportunity for me to branch out and meld this technique with a different medium. I decided to print out frames from the massive personal video resource that is the 11 years of video 8 tapes my Dad made while I was growing up, and try and put those images of my childhood in the 90s onto film. I’m interested in the idea of taking away the specific era of these videos, to make them generic, and to see what my childhood looks like on film and not video.

Richard Tuohy of Nanolab was fantastic, explaining everything about the process really clearly so that whatever level we were at it would make sense. I was doing the workshop with my friend Jacob, who had had no experience whatsoever with film or darkrooms. And things  which should have been clear to me since first year, but weren’t (probably due to the fact that the university put a bunch of our film lectures for the morning after student night), I now understand.

I printed the images out to be 16mm wide, and only 8fps, so the film plays three times as fast and only parts of the images are projected. I didn’t aim for accuracy because if I wanted to do that I would take each frame and refilm it manually. The photo above here shows a few frames of thase initial results, and it projects messily with glimpses of the odd face looking at the camera.

This is the start of something really exciting!