Shooting and Developing a Roll of Wolfman 35
It has been a while since I wrote an article about a new roll of film, though I have been trying out quite a few. When I went on my trip to Southern California at the end February, one of my stops was OC Camera in Laguna Hills. I had put it on the list of places to visit, much to the chagrin of partner and our four year old son. Still, it was on the list because they seemed to stock quite a few film types that I can’t readily get here in Victoria and I wouldn’t have to pay for shipping. One of the rolls that I decided to grab while I was there, was just a spur-of-the-moment thing, the box had a Werewolf on it and the writing was in old movie writing, I grabbed it. The roll turned out to be Wolfman 35 by the Film Photography Project.
I know that leads right into asking what the Film Photography Project (FPP) is, well apart from a popular podcast and a seller of lots photography gear and respooled film. They are also a film producer. This was a surprise to me actually. When I was starting my development for this film (which I will discuss in a bit) I started to try and find what the actual film stock was. Usually when you buy some random roll of film, especially in a silly box, it is almost always film stock from another brand that has been rebranded. My favourite colour film right now, as an example, Flicfilm Elektra 100 is actually Kodak Aerocolor IV; and so is Film Washi X, Santacolor 100 and Luminaire 100. There are likely many more as well. Anyways, try as I might, I couldn’t find anything saying what Wolfman 35 was. Just comments from FPP saying that it is a panchromatic black and white film on a triacetate base. Well I finally got my answer on YouTube from Eduardo Pavez Goye ,who is actually one of the better film photography youtubers out there. Early in his video on Wolfman 35 he confirms that is indeed a brand new in-house emulsion. And states that he spoke to FPP about it. You can watch that video here. I have to say, it is quite impressive for a small outfit like FPP, but begins to make more sense when we see that Wolfman 35 is also their black and white 16mm movie stock.
Okay on to the shooting, so I have been working on a bit of a project using black and white film, but not knowing how this film would look, I decided just to shoot it regularly. I guess I was expecting it to be almost like one of those old horror film stocks with dark dark shadows and blown out highlights. In the end I didn’t shoot anything really exciting at all because what I am usually doing with a new film stock is seeing if it is something I would use again. When I first looked at my negatives, I could tell right away that they were better than I was expecting and I would say that after scanning, I was actually really impressed. Wolfman 35 turns out to be a really nice black and white film and if you can get your hands on it, it is definitely worth shooting as a fine-grain well-balanced 100 ISO film. You can look at some of the photos below. I would love to know what you think though.
Developing
As I said above, I looked everywhere to find the film stock and that is because when I looked on the Mass Dev Chart under FPP Wolfman, they didn’t have my developer. That is not too much of a shock as I use the FlicFilm Black, White and Green developer which is not that commonly used (it just makes me feel a little better about the chemicals that you use). FlicFilm does list a lot development times for the more common film stocks, but again not anything this specialized. What I ended up doing is looking at the development times that were listed on the Mass Dev Chart for the film for some of the common developers and the times for it and then looked at the times for other films that were on the Black, White and Green Dev chart and then mapped out some comparison times. I finally figured that it was likely a 12-16 minute development process at 20C. I went right down the middle and went with 14 minutes with tank rotations once a minute. I followed the development with a six minute dunk in Ilford Rapid Fixer. Like I said, when I looked at the negatives they were clean, fully developed and full of detail. I could tell they were going to be good.
Once scanned, like I said before, this was a really nice black and white film. It has almost no grain, which is really impressive for a film out of a tiny outfit. If I could get this locally and cheap, this could actually be a day to day film in daylight. I didn’t try much indoor and no night time shooting so I don’t know how it would respond in that circumstance. If you happen upon a roll though I would suggest you grab it.
I would love to know what you think or if you have any experience with Wolfman 35, please let me know in the comments!