Open-Source Analog with Matt McWilliams

Interview by Hogan Seidel as part of the Analog Futures issue of Analog Cookbook

I met Matt McWilliams back in March 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown, at the Revolutions Per Minute experimental film festival hosted at Umass Boston. A wonderful festival of expanded cinema, analog film, and installation piloted by artist and professor Wenhua Shi. Matt came to see one of my expanded cinema works, and we had a pleasant conversation about hand processing old Ektachrome VNF-1 as E6. During that same festival, he hosted an inkjet printing and laser cutting 16mm film workshop at that same festival.

His kindness and generosity of knowledge delighted me so. The contemporary experimental film community sometimes feels so embedded in higher education, and the publish or perish environment that leads to toxic one-upmanship, and the withholding of knowledge. There is now a ton of cultural capital needed to navigate, get resources, exhibit, and thrive in the experimental film ecosystem. This feels like the antithesis of the radical possibilities of experimental film and its legacy of freely shared methods and processes. The way Matt shared resources reminded me of this radical possibility.

Matt is someone who is well known by many experimental filmmakers, collectives, and labs for preserving and building analog film equipment. This includes sequencers for Optical printers, intervalometers for 16mm Bolexes, and even printable 3D models of analog camera parts, editing supplies, and peg bars for animators. All these resources can be found for free on Matt's website. 

When I was asked to interview someone on the future of analog edition of Analog Cookbook, I thought of Matt not only because of these digital interventions to preserve the analog filmmaking practice and the crucial equipment used to make it, but because of his philosophy of what the experimental film community should be. A place of sharing and building knowledge collectively. Knowledge that is part of a dialog and legacy, and not one that is held and dies with the singular creative genius or institution.

Please enjoy this edited conversation I had with Matt McWilliams back in November 2021. There will be links to all his resources throughout.

Hogan: What type of work are you focusing on or expanding on currently?

Matt: I'm a little hesitant to talk too much about this project because I don't know where it's going to go or if it's going to end up in a dustbin. But I have been working on expanding a piece of software for Jodie Mack that she was working on with a grad student a few years ago. And it's related to a project that I put out while I was working on this called and it's a processing library called Soundtrack Optical, which allows you to take sound and generate a visual optical soundtrack with it. And this project for her is called Spirits and Objects, and it allows you to sonify images and then also create visual representations of the sound from Midi and from audio. And, put them all together in a composer timeline so you can sequence images that create sound and then produce a video that you can then film-out onto Super 16 and play it loops or project it. 

Hogan: And when you say push it back onto 16mm, do you mean actually printing the optical tracks? 

Matt: Well, you could do that. What we're trying to do is something that you can shoot onto a Super 16 image where the soundtrack is captured from the screen. You do a film-out from digital to film transfer, and then what's residing in the soundtrack is producing your sound. 

Hogan: Have other filmmakers used you as a resource for making work before? 

Matt: Yeah, I think when we first met, I was doing a printing and laser cutting 16mm workshop for Wenhua Shi, and he brought me in and kind of showed me the resources that he had access to in his classroom and the lab surrounding it. We came up with a curriculum based on what we had available. He has a laser cutter. He's got these nice printers. What can we do? How can we make film with it? And so that was the way that this project came to be. I've also come in contact with people through these projects that I've already built, like the Bolex intervalometer. Luis Macías from Crater Lab in Spain bought one from me, and then I've sort of helped them via correspondence build attachments for it that they could use to do additional things.

Hogan: Can you explain a little bit more. This is a resource for 3D printing, cutting, and programming your own Bolex intervalometer?

Matt: Yeah, for a Bolex Rex 4 or 5. So there's one, It's Arduino based and it's all button interaction and you can use a shutter release to manually trigger it and run it for a time lapse. Or you can use it as a single frame to shoot animations. And then I have another one that is Raspberry Pi based. It's more computer controlled. There's a web browser application and mobile app that can actually control it and digitally run it. I released the hardware files and the software for building and running both of those. 

Hogan: Bolexes intervalometers are incredibly difficult to find and are usually quite expensive, is that sort of what led you to create this open source?

Matt: When I was leaving undergrad and I realized I was losing access to a lot of these analog resources. I was like, “Well, do I go to grad school?” And that kind of felt like a Band-Aid. And I was very influenced by these two projects that were going on. One called the RepRap, the reproducible rapid prototyper. It's like this early open source 3D printer. The idea behind it was to build a machine that could then make copies of itself. And so that kind of led to the Cambrian explosion of 3D printers like the The MakerBot is based on a RepRap. Prusa, a much more ethical company than MakerBot, is also based on that. And I saw RepRap, and thought this is an amazing thing. It's not particularly cheap, but it is much cheaper than the commercial alternatives to it. It's not a one hundred thousand dollar 3D printer, it's one you can build for eight hundred dollars. That was really influential to me. And then there's this company called AdaFruit. It's founded by Limor Fried. I believe she was at the Media Lab not too long ago, and she was creating these like DIY electronics projects, which are all open hardware, open source and had amazing documentation and tutorials. And we're really aimed at amateurs and non-electrical engineers. That also led to its own proliferation in maker content. A lot of people who were not traditionally in this computer science space were able to do a lot of things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do without having to learn coding languages like C or Assembly. And I saw that as an opportunity to do maybe an equivalent project for film. And the intervalometer was perfect because it's a relatively simple machine that you can then build on top of with layers of complexity and abstraction. 

Hogan: That's so fascinating that you experienced the richness of being exposed to analog and experimental filmmaking in undergrad, but once you leave, resources are scarce and not often accessible. Though, some are fortunate to live close to labs and collectives like Mono No aware, AgX, Analog Filmwerke, Baltic, and so many others, you had to look towards another community of technologists, coders, and 3d printers, to continue your work in analog. 

Matt: I was thinking more at the time on the short term scale– what can I build in my room this year? I think my original approach was flawed. The idea that in order to create an apple pie from scratch, you have to invent the universe. Once I build a 3D printer, then I can use that to build the thing that I want. Right? 

Hogan: You had to rely on the legacy of others from the open-source community? You can start where others left off?

Matt: One of the sort of philosophical underpinnings of open source that I really like, at least coming from the software side of things where you don't have to reinvent everything all the time, you don't have to create your own standard. Everybody benefits from a shared standard like HTML, like that's a markup language. It's a shared standard. It's great because everyone can write it in the same way and then see it in their browser, right? 

Hogan: It's interesting that you're at the middle of all these artist-run labs and helping build materials that they need to survive. A lot of these machines, Oxberry printer, JK Optical Printers, Steenbecks, once a specific part breaks, that could be it. 

Matt: I think the holistic part of it is the philosophy of once I've done this for me, then it can work for people all around the world. Somebody from Brazil contacted me recently. They’re able to download this and print it locally. You know, there's no “shipping of atoms”. It's just, I did it here, and now you can do it there. And that's the winning part of the philosophy, I think. I think the approach kind of needs more discipline. There needs to be a “we need this now, we need this next” driving motivation.

Hogan: So much of the 16mm and analog film equipment has such craftsmanship to it, can last so long, but one screw or spring breaks, and you may be out of luck. You are creating these open source interventions for equipment that many people believe will inevitably be obsolete.

Matt: Yeah, It's particularly scary when you see a company go under that makes these parts or repairs these equipment. I mean, it happened with Oxberry. When they went under and they said, “Hey, listen, anybody who wants our stuff can just show up and take it.” So Steve Cossman from Mono No Aware showed up and grabbed pallets and pallets of documentation and these like minuscule parts and movements and everything. This past winter, we went through it and we did inventory on everything they had and just kind of went through and like, “Is this useful? What do we have?” Because it was really saving things from a burning building. It was what can we get in the truck? And it's really, you know, it's scary to see that go by the wayside. I mean, there's a lot of instances of that not happening where things just end up in a landfill. And with it so does a lot of the knowledge. That's the one that scares me the most. Is that proprietary knowledge of why the company did it this way. When trying to fix or replicate something, it becomes a long list of things that can go wrong without this proprietary knowledge.

Hogan: I think about this all the time when I am teaching on the JK optical printer. I look at my students, the ones who are really excited about it, and say, “If you want to use this, if you're excited about it, use it now because I don't how long this will last.” Every time something breaks, I think to myself, well, this may be it..  People still want JK Optical Printers, and many schools and labs are searching for them, but they are very difficult to maintain and keep operational.

Matt: One thing that I can do right now, that I've kind of focused on replacing, is the sequencer. I have made three so far that are at Franklin & Marshall College, Mono No Aware, and AgX. For everything else, you're looking for parts that already exist, that aren’t getting made anymore, on places like eBay. It’s Scary.

Hogan: Do you think there's enough to want for someone to build a new Optical Printer?

Matt: There could be. I think it would take a considerable engineering effort if it were not just a clean copy. And even that would be challenging. I mean, I've taken apart a number of those machines, and there is some very, very clever electronics and electrical, physical, mechanical work in there. That would be very difficult to recreate, at least for me. I think there might be other people out there who are further along with it, but there's definitely demand. And, actually there's a filmmaker in Canada, Sandy McLennan, and he and I were corresponding for a lot of early COVID. And he built a dual eight to 16 optical printer just from old machines that he had. He's using my software, and I built the camera controller for him. He can go from regular eight and super eight to double eight or 16 mm. There are people who have the want and are actively working towards this.

Hogan: It's interesting, so much of the open-source philosophy feels connected to artistic legacy and movements that stand on the shoulders of innovators and collaborations. With your work, others could possibly build their own optical printer.

Matt: Yeah, just like Analog Cookbook is influenced by Recipes for Disaster. And I think that is a seminal example of sharing a starting point for a ton of people who were doing alternative processes and home development. It starts with a seed like this, which is like a repository of collected knowledge and technique and can be expanded upon. I think that's one of the great things about sharing. You know, if everybody's working on their own design and not sharing what they're doing, how they're doing it, the electronic software, or whatever is behind it, I think the thing I'm worried about is recreating the kind of issue with JK or the issue with the Steenbeck where there is silos of knowledge.

Hogan: Knowledge that disappears with those who created it. And this has pushed you to publish your work for free? 

Matt: Yes, I currently host all my code on Github. They started as this place for people to share their software publicly in a known way. It is this way of managing your code, history and changes. So they have something called the Arctic Vault or the GitHub Arctic Vault. And what they do is they take a number of select projects. They convert them all to QR codes and then they commit them to film and then they bury it 500 meters under the Arctic as a long term archival strategy. And a couple of the projects that I put out are on that.

Hogan: We talked about a lot of your successful projects. Do you share projects that don’t work? If we are building on the research and knowledge of the collective, is there room for sharing failures?

Matt: People don’t like to share when things go wrong. I mean, I feel that way about a lot of my projects too. I've had a lot of false starts, or I've started to build something and then realize it's like it's way over my head, or I don't have the R&D costs to do it, or I started in completely the wrong way. I have put half finished things up and it has been a mistake. The only feedback I get is like, “why doesn't this work?” And it's like, OK, well, maybe I should just kind of keep those in private.

Hogan: Maybe if we embraced failure, our community knowledge would grow exponentially.

Matt: I'll create a project that kind of works for me, right? Like I can use it. I'm OK with the warts and imperfections. There's a very different thing in releasing something for other people, because there's this expectation of this kind of commercial product. There's not a really pervasive idea that, I'm going to own this thing and I'm expected to fix it or I'm expected to augment it. I do feel like it's tied in a little bit to commercialism. They expect a smartphone, right? It's like, I want this contained unit that does all of the things that are listed. 

Hogan: It’s wanting to use something instead of being a part of the knowledge that builds it. I am very much the former and enjoyer of convenience.

Matt: Right, exactly. And I think to me, that is what kind of creates and makes possible these silos we talked about with Oxberry and JK. When you expect a single craftsman to be the person that does the thing or creates the single product under this one name, then you risk that knowledge going with that company. Whereas with open source, there's this whole kind of dialog going on. The beauty of the open source experiment as it exists right now is that I've built on top of a lot of other people's work.

Hogan: And others will continue to build on your work.

Matt: One would hope.