Alternative Processes is an analog, experimental filmmaking class that has been happening since JANUARY 2010.

There are so many ways of making beautiful, crazy-interesting images on film.  IT IS a journey IN EXPERIMENTATION THAT IS playful, sometimes frustrating, very time consuming, but always very much worth it.

Processes alternative to… what? Anything. To what people usually do, to what has been tried and tested, to what people usually expect to see.  Maybe.

Chance, fate, MAGIC: often the film that you are making ASSERTS its OWN will and runs away. At some point, your position of CREATION SHIFTS into a position of blind following and trusting, often quite literally, given that a lot of it is done in the darkroom.

• We’ve ended up shooting both sides of the film on one side and needing to cut it down the middle with scissors, after which we spent 3 hours in the darkroom contact printing it by pinning down 6” of it at a time onto other film and exposing it.
• We’ve gone on many adventures both near and far to shoot our film.
• We’ve had the chance to use the optical printer (the machine that all special effects were made with before digitalization) at Cineworks to make different colours, zoom in, zoom out, slow it down, speed it up, etc.
• We have (accidentally) ended up with colour negative film and had to figure out fashioning a handmade contact printer using cranks and a photo enlarger, and then have had to do many tests to determine what all the colour knobs had to be turned to.
• We have made our own emulsion by mixing chemicals and then painted it onto film and made contact prints onto it.
• We have made Photograms or Rayograms: placing objects, transpArancies or negatives directly onto the film and exposing it using a photo enlarger.

And more…
There is no limit to what can be done. But more than that there is no limit to where you can be lead by the film.