Silva Shade

"This film, made in a Finnish forest in April this year, was hand processed in coffee developer to a black and white negative, fixed using sea salt water for 20 hours, and I then hand-painted it with photographic watercolours. I wanted to use a filmmaking process that was gentle on the magnificent environment I was in, and that’s what I came up with. I then inverted the film to create a positive image, where instead of being black, the trees are coloured. This is a new technique I developed, and have since shared with the artist analogue filmmaking community. ‘Silva’ is Latin for forest, and ‘silver’ is the essence of cinema, in all its many shades. I recorded the sound in the same forest, just as the snow began to slowly melt and the cranes were flying back for the beginning of Spring." — M.J.