invisible harvests

Stephanie Dudley, Canada

2026 | 6 min 12 sec

experimental stop-motion short film

English and French versions

download epk as pdf

Invisible Harvests treats the animation process as fermentation: a slow, transformative breakdown of materials and systems. Through salt, dried kombucha SCOBYs, distressed 16mm film, rice paper text, and bubbling ferments, the film traces how traditions and recipes are carried across generations. These lineages are never intact; they arrive fragmented, with missing pieces and distorted instructions.

The film focuses on the sensory residue of care — the persistent joy of everyday rituals that endure as the ground begins to shift. Attention turns toward the small, the peripheral, and the nearly imperceptible, where transformation is already underway.

animation techniques

Stop-motion puppets, 2D animation, reshooting onto 16mm film and hand developing, cameraless photography (phytograms), timelapse macro photography, pixillation

A woman inherits a recipe with missing steps — and tries to follow it anyway. A stop-motion and fermented film exploring what gets passed down, and what gets lost in translation.
Filmmaking for me is a way of rekindling a connection with the hidden world, the mystery of things that are alive and world-altering, even though we can’t see them. Many realms of life fit this category: the trillions of bacteria that set our moods and are connected to our nervous systems; the microorganisms underground that secure the roots of the trees; ancestors, memories and stories from the past.
Sometimes the past can seem foggy or lost, when our world and cultures shift so quickly beneath our feet. I’d like to dedicate this film to my unseen roots: ancestors who sent letters, trees and creatures that help clear the air that I breathe, and the connection with the earth that feeds my microbiome. Analogue film is like this: small surfaces that can be modified by plants and light, delicate things, then projected onto a large screen, conjuring new stories, feelings, and meanings. Something hidden becomes visible here.
In a time when interconnection generally means digital connectedness and communication, Invisible Harvests asks what happens when those systems go quiet? What other connections might surface then – memories, intuitions, feelings? This film is an attempt to listen for those quieter forms of connection, always emerging between the louder signals.
Nick Storring composed and performed all instrumental layers himself, building a dense, unstable orchestral bed from stacked recordings.
Throughout the score, recurring gestures surface and dissolve beneath a microtonal shimmer, creating a sense of longing and instability. For some sections, including the fermented 16mm sequences, he introduced some homespun physical processing to the score, using the instrumental recordings to activate the resonance of various objects, producing a sort of tactile distortion. The result is a score that feels alive and slightly precarious, mirroring the film’s shifting material surfaces.
Nick Lavigne built the sound design through a process of material experimentation that mirrors the film’s own logic. To capture the right bubble sounds, he submerged a hydrophone in various vessels and tested different methods of generating them – dropping a brick into water to displace air, dissolving Alka-Seltzer, and other approaches – until the textures felt right. He also chopped several cabbages to find the right sound for that sequence, and later fermented the casualties. For one section of the film, he ran audio through a vintage tape recorder, using its mechanical degradation to introduce distortion and age into the sound.