Reflecting artistic processes in non-fiction filmmaking: Ferroequinology

Ferroequinology is a documentary about railroad photography. The film follows two artists on journeys across America as they capture traces of locomotives in vast landscapes, intimate stories from passengers onboard and the experience of slow travel. It is also the result of several years collaborating with photographers and exploring different ways to reveal their artistic practices.
As such, the film broadly contributes to two aspects of screen production research. Firstly, furthering depictions of photography and artistic processes in non-fiction film by engaging in practice-led exploration whereby, as Frankham (2018, p.185) suggests, the “form of the work becomes part of the rhetorical strategy of engagement, contemplation and connection” or, in a more general sense, research through art and design (Frayling, 1993, p.4). Secondly demonstrating the application of contextual theoretical investigation within a creative film process, in this case into the intertwined histories of cinema and railroad technologies which, drawing on Frayling’s (1993, p.5) terms again, constitutes research for art and design as “the thinking is, so to speak, embodied in the artefact”.