Since its inception just a few years ago, the Academy Museum has hosted many excellent, family-friendly educational workshops dedicated to the art and craft of filmmaking. Kicking into high gear in the new year, the museum is set to have its first tactile filmmaking workshop of 2025 on January 19th.
Film educator Tuni Chatterji recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom about the programs she is involved with and how these events keep the history of physical film alive by enticing the young and feeding the nostalgia of older generations.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and context]
How long have you been with the Academy?
I’ve been with the Academy for seven years. I was with the archive then the museum, putting together the curriculum for school tours. This opportunity opened up for film education to lead filmmaking workshops for people, and guests, particularly for emerging adults. So my primary area of focus is called the Promise Workshops, but in addition to that, I do these drop-in filmmaking workshops.
The last event I attended was about home movies, tell me about that…
Yeah, so that day we called Celebrating Home Movies, and it was a multi-part day to get visitors to reconnect with the lost art of home movie making, and how to stay connected with your home movies. We had projection workshops and we had three archivists from the Academy Film Archive leading that workshop to get people to understand the history of small gauge film.
We focused on Super 8mm, 8mm, and 16mm that day. They had brought multiple projectors for people to play around with, and hands-on experience of threading and projecting film. Then the second part of the workshop was called the Tactile Filmmaking Workshop, and we do that regularly (the next one is on the 19th).
That’s a very accessible direct-on-film animation workshop where people decorate and paint onto the 16-millimeter film itself. From all that we created a communal project. Everyone makes their pieces then we splice them all together. Then we screened it along with some gems from the Academy Archive.
How big is the Academy’s collection of home movies?
I think there are over 3000 films that the academy has collected that are home movies, and some of those are Hollywood home movies. So home movies from people in the industry, including Alfred Hitchcock. Sometimes home movies (of home movie style footage) are blended into films like 2022’s Aftersun.
When would you say that the home movie era ended? Now everyone has cameras and their not necessarily home movies but are often used for social media and have a different aesthetic feel…
As soon as consumer video cameras started, maybe let’s say the eighties, but it’s hard to say. I feel like I don’t have a real grasp on if families are still making… if they sit and they’re like, okay, we’re going to make a home movie today. It’s not necessarily something that you plan. I don’t know if it’s ended, but the way that we document our lives is different.
It’s certainly transferred to something else. I feel like there were steps along the way. There were originally film cameras, few homes had those, then you had the camcorders that were more common, and that shifted into phones…
Probably when we got handheld phones that have video capacity. That’s sort of a new era that we’ll have to figure out. There’s a cool event that we participated in called Home Video Day. So the new generation of archivists, I think they’re really into these, or they’re interested in born-digital material. The more we do home movie kind of themed workshops, it’s worthwhile to continue exploring how the home movie and the nostalgia for that.
What sort of conversations do you have with budding filmmakers? I assume people come to the museum and maybe they already have a passing interest in film, but you have an opportunity where you can inspire them. Tell me about one of those moments.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What makes our workshops unique? The inter generational connection that happens during the workshop is special. It stands out to me because you have people who grew up with film, who saw projectors in their classroom or who maybe worked as editors using celluloid film, and then they bring their kids in or they meet someone in the workshop who’s discovering it for the first time.
This shared experience around a passion for filmmaking or just watching movies is special. It sparks a kind of connectivity that I just feel like is missing from a lot of other places in the world. We’re so divided just what we were talking about and we’re so much in our phones. So having these collective experiences is unique and powerful.
Illustrate some examples of projects…
Giving people two seconds worth of film and saying, okay, you have to animate it. They spend three or four hours working on it. There’s something about, I think people walk away understanding the craft of filmmaking on a deeper level. It’s so fun because little kids, two-year-olds can also make films in this classroom.
Talk about coordinating these events with the museum’s current exhibits.
One of the things that I think a lot about is just how the essential components of filmmaking are light and motion and time, that kind of very broad ideas and making those little moments feel very kind of personal. So we focus a lot on personal filmmaking and our workshops and then connect that directly to the Color In Motion exhibit easily because it ties directly to the tactile filmmaking workshop.
There’s this connection between what’s happening in the gallery, what constitutes an art form or an art practice, filmmaking practice, and then to come and have this direct experience between the gallery and the education workshop. So our broader educational department has a philosophy of excess and agency.
In the end, it all connects together, everything you see on display at the museum space is integrated with the educational aspect.
That’s exciting to me. There’s all these different ways that you can connect to filmmaking. I think production design is an interesting thing that we’ll have more to talk about in the future. The specializations and the crafts of filmmaking. What sets the film education department aside, and makes it unique is there are moments for visitors to make films together.
The next Drop-in Tactile Filmmaking Workshop takes place at The Academy Museum on January 19th.
