Making movies gets down to basics

Rice students retro-engineer manufacture of film stock

By Patrick Kurp
Special to the Rice News

Tish Stringer, a lecturer and film program manager in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice, hopes to revive an art form that, while no one was looking, has almost disappeared.

“I attended a workshop at the Eastman Museum in which we made 35 millimeter motion picture film by hand,” Stringer said. “I thought it was amazing and wanted to try to replicate it so Rice students could make their own film, shoot it and process it themselves.”

Rice undergraduates initiated a project to resurrect the manufacture of 16mm film stock. From left: Tammita Phongmekhin, Mathias Adamu, Hope Fa-Kaji, Annabel Chang and John Keogh. Photo by Donald Soward

Stringer acknowledges her engineering skills are modest, so she turned to a handy pool of talent: Rice engineering students. “I don’t have, can’t get and have no idea where to start to make the machines needed to coat film with light-sensitive emulsion,” she said. “I can make the emulsion, but not coat or perforate the film stock.”

The design team Reel Film, advised by Rice engineering lecturer Deirdre Hunter, came to the rescue. “Analog film-making is artistically valuable but almost impossible to duplicate the way it used to be,” said Annabel Chang, a freshman in mechanical engineering and a member of Reel Film. “We approached the problem as engineers trying to solve a problem.”

Chang’s teammates are Mathias Adamu and John Keogh, freshmen in mechanical engineering; Hope Fa-Kaji, a freshman in materials science and nanoengineering, and Tammita Phongmekhin, a sophomore in electrical and computer engineering. Their assignment was to design and build a machine to coat strips of perforated nylon with photographic emulsion to create 16 mm analog film stock.

The students’ hand-cranked device spreads an even coat of emulsion on the nylon film and dries it. Photo by Donald Soward

The team’s final prototype consists of a wooden frame, two film reels, a hand crank, a syringe and pressure-applying weight mechanism, a tube and 3D-printed slit connected to the end of the syringe, a bumper, a platform supporting the film as it moves through the process, a gutter for holding the emulsion and a fan.

“We learned that it takes 4 1/2 minutes for the emulsion to dry on the film strip,” Keogh said. “We had to incorporate that information into the design.”

Each component is the result of months of trial-and-error experimentation. The emulsion must be heated to 50 to 55 degrees Celsius (122 to 131 degrees Fahrenheit) and loaded into the syringe. Weights on the wooden block above apply constant downward pressure, permitting the emulsion to flow at a constant rate.

The uncoated nylon strip is mounted on a wooden dowel holding the first reel. A foam stopper provides resistance to keep the film strip taut as the crank advances it. The reel of coated film is held in place by a metal rod connected to the hand crank. After the strip is coated, the fan dries it.

“It still needs work,” Adamu said. “We know that. We’ll pass along what we’ve done to another team that’s interested in it.”

Stringer is pleased with their progress. For her, movies made on 16 mm or 35 mm are more than an exercise in nostalgia.

“Is film-on-film production still viable?” she asked. “It very much is and I would argue it’s even on a dramatic upswing. Kodak opened three new film-processing labs this year. We’ve started using the one in Atlanta. Georgia is a hub for film and television production. ‘The Walking Dead’ is shot and processed there on 16 mm film. Rice Media Center is proud to still teach film-on-film making and we still project 35 mm and 16 mm film at Rice Cinema.”

– Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.