invisible harvests

Stephanie Dudley, Canada

2026 | 6 min 12 sec

experimental stop-motion short film

English and French versions

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.
I grew up inspired and mentored by two women in my family who gave me different, and sometimes contradictory, instructions for living. My aunt – who I didn’t see regularly, as she was often travelling – gave me a sense of adventure, a feeling that anything was possible, that I could be exactly who I was. My mother gave me something harder and more practical: the knowledge that the ground is inherently shaky, and you had better be ready.
But they, too, were shaped by grief, struggle, and cultural inheritance. The recipes they passed down had missing steps. I spent a long time not knowing what those steps were – only that something was absent. But like fermentation, the process was happening anyway – below the surface, in the waiting.
Invisible Harvests is my attempt to sit with that absence, and to find within it what was still being transmitted. Because even in their limitations, they were teaching me something: about patience, about endurance, about the quiet persistence of things that can’t be seen.
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.