Project: Oxberry optical printer programme

For Re-Engineering the Industry, a new generation of filmmakers will learn how to work with optical printing in the medium of analogue film and become familiar with one of the most versatile and precise (analogue) printers in the world: the Oxberry Optical Printer.

The Oxberry optical printer is the cream of the crop among analogue film printers and it’s applied for manually created analogue special effects on 16mm and 35mm film. An optical printer is a device consisting of one or more film projectors mechanically linked to a film camera. It allows filmmakers to re-photograph one or more strips of film. With special lenses for resizing and distorting the material with projectors sending the film image to the camera, fade-outs and fade-ins, dissolves, slow motion, fast motion and image overlays, extraordinary results can be easily achieved. More complicated work can involve dozens of elements, all combined into a single scene. A good example of optical printing is the “matte work” in Star Wars in which two or more picture elements are combined into a single, final image. Other labs with Oxberry printers are: L’Abominable Paris, MTK Grenoble, Lift Toronto