Matt McWilliams is an artist and inventor working on free, open-source and open-hardware tools for analog filmmakers and photographers.
He works as a software developer in robotics research in the greater Boston area.
His website, [sixteenmillimeter.com](https://sixteenmillimeter.com), hosts various models for 3D printing as well as software and design documents for machines for making analog cinema that are all freely-available to use and modify under [The MIT License](https://opensource.org/license/mit).
The purpose of this project is to develop a free, open-source and open-hardware desktop contact printer for 16mm film to allow artists the ability to make prints of their 16mm films from negatives and other sources that would be cost and time prohibitive to do at a small scale at a commercial film lab.
Contact printers are an essential piece of film lab equipment that perform a simple but important service for filmmakers.
By taking two (or more) pieces of film--one of them developed and the other undeveloped--and sandwiching them together at the emulsion (the "contact") a light can be shined behind the developed film to impart a negative of the image on the undeveloped film.
In the simple case of having a stand of developed negative black and white 16mm film, one can pair it with a piece of undeveloped black and white 16mm print stock and produce a positive image that can be used for projection.
This project aims to leverage advances in 3D printing, cheap-but-reliable geared DC motors and open-platform microcontrollers to build a small, affordable and reproducible contact printer which can be used as-is or adapted and modified to fit the purposes of individuals and groups who are working with particular analog production techniques.
### Relevancy and Quality of the Project
Many artist-run film labs and individual filmmakers who work with small gauge analog film do not have access to large footprint commercial machines and lack the space and maintenance resources to keep them.
Since information about commercially-developed equipment is guarded, expensive or even lost to time, starting a project from the principles of free, open-source software (FOSS) gives it a better chance to exist in the open where others can freely access it and improve upon it's development without the risk of violating patents or copyright.
By designing a desktop-scale contact printer, in the spirit of the Detroit-made Uhler...
