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.
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 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.
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.
Stringer is pleased with their progress. For her, movies made on 16 mm or 35 mm are more than an exercise in nostalgia.
– Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.
The Rice News is produced weekly by the Office of Public Affairs at Rice University.