Wyrd Lab / HOME

FOLK

What is a "folk film lab"?

Cinema is after all a modern popular culture medium, produced on an industrial scale, and distributed globally. This is at odds with conventional notions of folk art; traditional, individually crafted, and localised.

As the digital revolution swept through the film industry in the early to mid 2000s, cinemas and university departments rushed to dispose of celluloid film projectors, cameras and editing equipment, making a break with the archaic tools of the past and ushering in a more cost-effective future. In many cases that equipment was simply destroyed, but where possible, artist-run collectives and film labs were able to recover 16mm and 35mm projectors, Steenbeck editors, optical printers and more. These obsolete resources are now collectively owned by a global network of some 74 active labs, and are available for individual artists to use in the creation of hand-crafted, artisanal works of art. The knowledge of how to process motion-picture film, long gatekept by the film industry for profit, is now in the public domain.

At Wyrd Lab we are committed to expanding access to anaologue film processes among common folk, so ordinary people may make extraordianry films.

WORKSHOPS

We run workshops, both online and in-person, on small-footprint darkroom processing. When we speak about a small-footprint darkroom, we mean small in terms of space, equipment, and the impact of the chemical processes used.

Many artists feel that celluloid filmmaking is too expensive or complicated to incorporate into their practices. We try to empower artists and practitioners whose backgrounds have excluded them from experimenting with celluloid film by demystifying the process, outlining the science behind the photochemical reaction. Armed with this knowledge, artists are able to make their own developers and fixers from scratch using household or natural ingredients at minimal cost and environmental impact.

Influenced by structural and experimental filmmaking techniques, the work from these workshops is always playful, spontaneous, and full of happy accidents and chance operations.

Wyrd Lab has delivered workshops for Barking Community Cinema, Culture Within Newham, and Bored Peach Club.

SCREENINGS

At Wyrd Lab we host screenings of analogue folk films.

While some are more overtly folk-coded than others, sometimes veering into the territory of folk horror, all embrace the alchemy and tangibility of celluloid film processing. They are independently-produced, often processed by hand, and shot on the amateur formats of Super 8 and 16mm. They are not products to be consumed, but deeply personal works to be collectively enjoyed and engaged with.

COMMUNITY

We are currently supporting the delivery of Barking Community Cinema’s free-to-access darkroom programme, but soon we hope to establish a permanent space for Essex-based filmmakers and artists to experiment with analogue film production and research.

An artist-run film lab in Essex would give local filmmakers access to film cameras and analogue film processes, and a space to collaborate and exchange with artists, both locally and through the worldwide network of artist-run film laboratories.