Accelerated print development for effect

[Robert A. Zeichner]

Thank you all for your suggestions. I'm going to do some warm developer experiments this weekend and will report my findings.

[Donald Qualls]

Just in case it's not too late -- however you do the process, if you're digitally editing the video, it should be easy to "compress" the action in the editor, so that 30-45 seconds for the image to come up can be compressed into, say, 10 seconds to avoid straining the attention spans of the uninitiated. Alternately, you could even to a fade dissolve from blank paper to fully developed print, and if the print doesn't move between the two shots, be almost indistinguishable from the original except for the time elapsed.

[C. D. Keth]

While it's not quite accurate to the development if prints, I know a solution that will be by far the easiest. Just use an already developed print and, for the scene, "develop" it in water but don't have the person agitate it. Then shoot a shot of a blank white sheet of paper in the water. In post, lay a mask of the black paper in water over the print and clean up the edges. Then it's just a matter of changing the opacity of the mask to develop the print. Easy as cake, any decent post guy should be able to do it in a jif. Just remember to shoot both parts of the equation for each shot of the developing print you will want.