Private Project

CHRONOTYPE

CHRONOTYPE is a meditation on consciousness, memory and the passage of time. Analogue images of a man travelling on a steam train intertwine with corroded snapshots of places, landscapes and fleeting human moments, creating a shifting reverie where memory can never be fully recalled, only reconstructed.
Real and imagined experiences blur as familiar journeys become strange once more. Through decaying celluloid, layered textures and mechanical rhythms, CHRONOTYPE invites the viewer to reflect on travel, mortality and the traces we leave behind—echoes of lives once lived and memories continually reshaped by time.

  • Shelley Hopkins
    Director
  • Shelley Hopkins
    Editor
  • Lily Markiewicz
    Editing Consultant
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Music Video, Short
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 22 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 16, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    0 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Altered Images _ Experimental Film And Music Fest
    London
    United Kingdom
    October 25, 2025
    Official Selection
  • Darkroom Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    September 13, 2025
    Official Selection
  • Hallucinea Film Festival

    Official Selection
  • Sunday Shorts Film Festival

    Semi-Finalist
  • Kinocaravan

    Semi_Finalist
Director Biography - Shelley Hopkins

Shelley Hopkins is an artist-filmmaker whose work explores the relationship between sound, material transformation and perception. Working with analogue and experimental processes, she films everyday substances, chemical reactions and altered film stock, often at magnified scales. Developed through close collaborations with musicians, her films emerge through an iterative dialogue between image and sound, creating immersive audiovisual works. Screenings for her films BINAURAL GLASS, CHRONTYPE, MARS and BECOMING include Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Altered Images, Darkroom Festival, New Jersey Independent Film Festival, Ghent International Film Week and Ardennes International Film Festival. BECOMING has won awards for Best Experimental Film, Best Installation Film and Best Avant-Garde Film.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

CHRONOTYPE is a collaboration with Sheffield based independent music producer sHeFf_ pOLy, as he describes his approach: "the track focuses on polyrhythmic interactions, using instruments as percussion. Making music is always generative... I don't mind mistakes; they feel like artefacts of the process."

I created this short experimental film by working directly on Super 8 stock. This found footage already contains film artefacts such as scratches and deterioration. I've abstracted the material further with the physical process of experimenting on around 300 x foot length film strips, using substances such as household bleach, iron chloride and sea salt to largely dictate the aesthetic while following their chemistry. The rhythms and sounds in the music drove the edit, which developed from the main musical motif resonating with steam trains. This instinctively led to a film that explores a journey of the mind, a meditation on consciousness and memory.