'Seasonal Concerns' (2024)

some notes and behind the scenes pics

Jun 28, 2025

Hello world, and welcome to my first post here, about the making of Seasonal Concerns, a film I shot in July and November of 2023, and which screened around the world in 2024.

For those who haven’t already seen the film, I’ll embed it to watch it at the bottom of this post. What follows are some notes on & some images from the making of the film.

Seasonal Concerns was my first foray into shooting multiple exposures in-camera on 16mm film. While I had enjoyed combining visual layers in digital workflows for years, this was my first time attempting to do so all-analog, and thus before I could see how any of the results would end up looking. With a 16mm Bolex camera, the traditional method of creating multiple exposures is to use a rewind key. After seeing various films by Greek-American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos employing this method, I was excited to try it out for myself.

The only problem? I didn’t have a rewind key. What I did have was some old Kodak EXR 16mm film with double perforation, and I realized I could film the entire roll through, and then simply flip the roll over to reload the camera, and then shoot a second layer of image! Below is an image of the film strip from a positive print of the film. On the right (clear side) are the actual perforations, and on the left (black) are images of the second row of perforations which are physical present on the negative of the film. Note: if you want to take an accurate image of a film strip, the perforation should actually be on the left, but I didn’t know what I was doing when I took that picture.

The tricky thing about shooting multiple exposures by flipping the roll of film was that it meant the second layer of images would be upside down! So I composed accordingly, and even shot one shot upside down, so that it would appear right side up in the film.

My subjects were the statues that populated Weißensee (‘the white lake’), a district of Berlin where I’d been living since 2018. Since it was a mere five minute walk from my front door, I had walked around (and filmed!) Weißensee countless times, often finding myself mesmerized by its collection of statues, which stood in solitude, without any information about who had made them or what they stood for, as if they had simply been there since the lake had come into existence.

Translated from German Wikipedia:

“There are several monuments and sculptures in the park. Two tritons created by Hans Schellhorn in 1912 stand on the corner pillars of the viewing terrace.”

“…the Aufbauhelferin has been standing since 1968. It is dedicated to the women who worked to clear up the rubble in the city center after the Second World War and was designed by Eberhard Bachmann.”

die Aufbauhelferin / The rebuilder by by Eberhard Bachmann

“The memorial to the anti-fascist resistance fighters at the southern exit near Berliner Allee was created by students at the Weißenseer Kunsthochschule.”