Austin Public Library’s Howson Branch was not exactly a quiet zone on a recent Monday night. People filled every table in the meeting room and spread out to more tables squeezed between bookshelves. They had come for Film Strip Club.
“You don’t have to have any sort of special background or extra training to partake,” said Jennifer Quarles, a regular attendee for nearly a year. “It’s just an hour and a half where everybody just creates together and makes something new.”
The once-a-month, free club offers a chance for members to explore direct animation using 16-millimeter film — a process where film stock is manipulated using techniques like drawing, painting or scratching to create a new image on top of the existing ones.
“I don’t know much about film, and I’ve certainly never just handled film and then purposely messed it up as an art form,” said Megan Rosales, another dedicated clubgoer. “It’s really fun and kinda challenging to not have a plan and just go for it.”
Tess Tarses uses a magnifying glass to look at a film strip.
Each session starts with a screening of the previous month’s creations on a 16-millimeter-film projector. Members also receive digital copies of their animations.
Justin Green, the assistant manager at the Howson Branch, runs Film Strip Club in collaboration with staff from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, or TAMI. A film major in college, he founded the program with TAMI’s digitization lab manager, Victoria Perez, after bonding over a mutual love of direct animation at a friend’s birthday party.
While the library pays for art supplies and some film, TAMI gives the club access to specialty skills and equipment for free. It also digitizes members’ films.
“We wanted to provide a space where people could try out this art form with no barrier to entry, totally free and open to the public,” Green said. “We provide the materials. We have the 16-millimeter projector. Texas Archive has the infrastructure to digitize patrons’ films professionally, which would cost a lot of money elsewhere.”
Members of Film Strip Club gather supplies during their meeting at the Howson library in West Austin.
TAMI’s library was also a source for some of the film people animate over.
“We’re funded through the Texas Film Commission. We go around to cities in Texas, people bring their tapes and videos, and we digitize them for free,” Perez said. “We had a lot of educational films, PSA reels we had digitized and were in the process of getting rid of. So we started off using those.”
The club hosted its first meeting in October 2024. The turnout was greater than Green and Perez expected. And that momentum has continued: More than 60 patrons went to the August meet-up.
Green believes the club is popular in part because it’s in person.
“Direct animation lends itself to people making friends,” he said. “Sitting at a table with strangers working on your film — that requires focus, but also lends itself to being able to make conversation with people.”
There are always new faces, but several folks are there every month. Some members, like Quarles, have even helped expand the materials and techniques the club uses.
“We do a lot of experiments outside of film club,” she said. “We found a type of alcohol marker that worked better than Sharpies. We experimented with some tape that you can cut up and stick onto the surface of the film, and now the library has brought some of those materials on.”
Elan Mendoza and Lena Mani draw on film during Film Strip Club.
Other members have become interested in analog film preservation through the club. A few have even gone on to intern at TAMI.
“Counterintuitively, people are becoming interested in the world of archives by destroying film, defacing it, and drawing, painting, scratching on it and cutting it up,” Green said.
He hopes members will sustain the analog techniques being taught in Film Strip Club.
“A lot of the tools used for this form of filmmaking are older and being phased out. We don’t want these technologies to be fully inaccessible or have these materials, via the scarcity of these types of equipment, get so expensive that the barrier to entry becomes high,” Green said.
Members use paint and other art supplies to create images on the film.
Perez stepped back from the group earlier this year. She passed her duties on to TAMI intern Paige Applin.
“I didn’t wanna see Film Strip Club go away,” Applin said. “It’s a cool place where people can share their love of film and make something with their hands. There’s not many other spaces in town where people can get together like this for free.”
Green plans to step aside, too, someday, so he’s making sure there’s someone at the library who can take the reins. People come and go, but he wants Film Strip Club to be forever.
“We can’t solve all of life’s problems at the library,” he said, “but we can at least be a resource to offer something exciting and invigorating through these low barrier to entry activities.”