SEQUEL
2026 RESEARCH PROJECT PROPOSAL
PROJECT SUMMARY
SEQUEL is a period of R&D investigating analog filmmaking techniques, anchored in a 16mm artist’s film using visual effects to explore trans+ embodiment. The project explores how mirrored movement can combine with analog visual effects to blend two trans+ bodies on film and transform them into a hybrid, multi-gender body that speaks to the inner experience of recognising yourself through the presence of another body.
PREVIOUS WORK: 12 ATTEMPTS (2023)
Stills and video from 12 attempts (to collapse my infinity), a series of 12 self-portraits I created on medium format film and digital video to question the legibility of the trans+ body when stripped of external context (e.g. clothes, community).
SEQUEL emerged as a research question generated by audience feedback to 12 attempts: those who recognized me intuitively as trans+ were all themselves genderqueer. SEQUEL inherits the style and studio setting of its predecessor, introducing a second body to explore the phenomenon of trans+ embodiment through shared relation and gesture.
PREVIOUS 16MM PROCESSING RESEARCH (2024)
University test of 16mm hand-processing & solarisation techniques as a visual strategy to evoke shifting inner experience. Developed during my 2023-2024 M.A. over two days at Erewhon lab under James Holcombe's guidance. SEQUEL would explore similar techniques with greater diversity, sophistication & precision.
PREVIOUS MOVEMENT RESEARCH (2025)
Initial digital test by Vivienne Le & myself investigating how mirrored gestures could combine with overlaid images to create a hybrid body. SEQUEL proposes to take this and future movement research onto 16mm, using contact & optical printing with analog processing effects to achieve a kaleidoscopic, 'fused' hybrid body that breathes with the texture and materiality of film.
SEQUEL (Movement Research 2025)
VIVIENNE LE WORK SAMPLE
Vivienne Le (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based performance and interdisciplinary artist working with the body, endurance, and social choreography. Their practice investigates power, vulnerability, and the residue of embodied experience through live action, collaboration, and material trace. SEQUEL marks our first major performance collaboration. See below no title (weave work I), their collaborative performance with Freedom Alexander Snow.
no title (weave work I) - preview
PREVIOUS INSTALLATION WORK
Documentation from my previous 16mm moving image installation using immersive spatial strategies as a way to expand the sensory possibilities & incorporate the audience's bodies into the work. Call on Me, Me, Me interrogates the inheritance of masculinity down three generations of male bodies. It combines hand-processed 16mm film & video witih digital projection & VFX blending modes to emulate some of the analog effects I want to explore with SEQUEL.
CALL ON ME, ME, ME (2024, goldsmiths afmi ma show)
3-channel film installation 16mm black&white & digital video (4:3), 5-channel sound
CALL ON ME, ME, ME (TRAILER)
LETTERS OF SUPPORT
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INDEXTHUMB CV
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SELECTED BIOS
INDEXTHUMB
indexthumb is a moving image & dance artist exploring the body's materiality when translated between physical and media forms. Experimenting with the formal qualities of screendance, they focus on moving image’s capacity to alter, enhance, and reorient somatic awareness, and the parallels between these processes and queer/trans+ perception. Their movement practice serves as a source of this investigation, centering itself in contemporary improvisation, partnering, and vertical dance. The research is then transferred to film, blending 16mm with digital VFX to create moving image installations. Their experience spans a range of ambitious projects, from a contemporary dance using live motion capture and realtime VR (GOLEM), to an indie feature film (Killer Whales) and four-channel, ambisonic AV installation (COMMUTE)
VIVIENNE LE
Vivienne Le (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based performance and interdisciplinary artist working with the body, endurance, and social choreography. Their practice investigates power, vulnerability, and the residue of embodied experience through collaboration, material trace, and reconfiguring canonical gestures. In SWEAT PAINTINGS (in collaboration with Cassils and martial arts consultant Melissa Wyman), she reinterpreted Yves Klein’s Anthropometries through self-defense choreography, generating sweat as both mark-making and resistance. In Weavework, they participated in a collaborative activation of structure, foregrounding interdependence and tension within collective bodies
EREWHON / JAMES HOLCOMBE
erehwon was founded by artist James Holcombe, a filmmaker with decades of experience in photochemical film production. James previously managed the photochemical lab resources at no.w.here in Bethnal Green, East London. erehwon holds a range of 8mm and 16mm film production resources including 16mm and Super 8 cameras, a JK-45 optical printer, a Bell and Howell contact printer, a Steenbeck 16mm editing table, HD telecine machine, and film processing and printing equipment
PROFESSOR STEPHEN JOHNSTONE
Professor Stephen Johnstone has worked in collaboration with Graham Ellard since 1993. Their work is concerned with the relationship between pre-cinematic spectacle and immersive space and abstract film and cinematic spectacle. This body of work exists at the intersection of architecture and film and draws on and emphasises the architectural qualities of the projected video image to create an immersive and dynamic space that the spectator experiences as a kind of performer. Most recently, their work has engaged with the conventions of representing architectural space in film
JAMIE CREWE
Jamie Crewe is an artist working with video, text, installation, sculpture, drawing, painting and music. Their work is an ambitious and complex investigation of community, culture and self. Through poetic retellings of Ancient Greek myths, Victorian literature, Scottish folklore and more, they create dreamlike vignettes that express constriction and resistance. Crewe’s experiments with established narratives create new allegorical traditions that give voice to thoughts & feelings that have no language of their own. In 2022 they were nominated for the Film London Jarman Award