It has been a while since our last update, and we are sorry for the long wait. Some of you may have noticed that our June launch has moved to a less defined Summer 2026. The main reason is that the design has taken longer than we first expected. As it looks now, we should be able to open the IndieGoGo campaign in the second half of summer, most likely August. Further down you will see why we want the extra time, and it mostly comes down to user testing.
Development of Frank is progressing well, and we have been refining the machine to the point where we can soon move into user testing. The first units will go to a small group of experienced users, which will give us valuable feedback for the next stage of development.
The overall industrial design is now largely finalized, and we will reveal more of that later. Our focus has shifted to fine-tuning the details and running tests to validate the construction and the selected components.
Reel
We have spent a lot of time on the reel itself. The starting point was the Lomo UPB-1A spiral, a design familiar to many people who have worked with 8 mm and 16 mm film. The Lomo has been out of production for years, and nobody is really making a good replacement, so a reliable reel of this type could be useful to people well beyond Frank itself. It is no secret that loading these reels can be challenging, and that is the part we wanted to get right.
One of the biggest difficulties happens when two reels are stacked on top of each other. Loading the bottom reel is particularly tricky, because you cannot easily touch the film during loading. It becomes hard to tell whether the film is advancing correctly, whether a gap has formed between the layers, or whether it is winding on top of itself. Some experienced users have even learned to judge the loading by sound, listening for the clicking or cracking that tells them the film is feeding correctly.
To address this, especially on the bottom reel, we added a spacer disc. Similar in design to the top disc, it lets you gently touch the film during loading and check that it is feeding properly through the reel. It is a small addition, but it takes most of the guesswork out of loading.
The spacer disc also serves a second purpose. By flipping it over, the reel can be configured for either 8 mm or 16 mm film.
Specs
- Reel capacity 2 × 50 ft
- Half-filled tank volume under 1 litre
- Battery powered 2 × 18650 cells
- Processes it can handle B&W, C-41, E-6, ECN-2, ECP
Design considerations and community questions
A few questions have come up from the community. Here are the main ones.
I don't understand how a vertical reel develops the film properly if only half of it is covered by chemistry.
The principle is the same as in many rotary film processors. The film continuously rotates through the chemistry, so it does not need to remain fully submerged at all times. This allows us to significantly reduce the amount of chemistry required.
The main consequence of rotary processing is that black-and-white development typically needs to be shortened by around 15%. It can also produce slightly higher contrast compared to traditional inversion processing. These characteristics are well known and have been used successfully in rotary processors for decades.
Someone shooting only 8 mm would be wasting chemistry by using a tank large enough for 16 mm, wouldn't they?
That is a fair point, and it reflects one of the key compromises we faced during development. If we had optimized the system primarily for 16 mm film, we would have designed a reel capable of holding 2 × 100 ft rolls. In that scenario, loading 8 mm film would leave a large portion of the reel unused, resulting in unnecessarily high chemical consumption.
Instead, we chose to optimize the system around 8 mm film, which is currently the format used by most home movie enthusiasts. At the same time, we wanted to preserve compatibility with 16 mm film. The current design allows either 2 × 50 ft rolls of 8 mm or 2 × 50 ft rolls of 16 mm to be processed.
This approach does require approximately 0.2 litres more chemistry than a tank designed exclusively for 8 mm film. However, it remains considerably more efficient than existing solutions. For example, the Lomo tank requires approximately 1.2 litres of chemistry for 2 × 50 ft of 8 mm film and around 1.7 litres for 2 × 50 ft of 16 mm film. By keeping Frank's chemistry requirement at just 1 litre, we reduce waste for both formats while still supporting 8 mm and 16 mm processing.
Another important consideration was that most modern colour processing kits are supplied in 1-litre volumes and are designed for reuse. Aligning the tank's capacity with these kits makes the workflow simpler, more economical, and more practical for most users.
Does it support 35 mm?
We have not developed our own reel specifically for 35 mm. However, the system is compatible with the Lomo reel, which can be configured for 35 mm. This means that Frank can be used to process up to 50 ft of 35 mm film when paired with the Lomo reel.
Please consider making this big enough to fit a 100 ft reel.
We have actually spent quite a bit of time considering that option. From an engineering perspective, it would not be particularly difficult to create a version designed for 100 ft reels. Most of the components could simply be scaled up to accommodate the larger format.
However, our focus with Frank has been to address the needs of the largest segment of users first. Since 8 mm film is considerably more popular than 16 mm among home movie enthusiasts, we felt it was safer to introduce the 50 ft model as the initial product and gauge market interest. A larger-capacity version remains an interesting possibility for the future. If there is enough demand from the community, a dedicated 100 ft model is certainly something we would consider developing.
What's next
With the reel design taking shape and the first user testing units nearly ready, the coming months will be focused on gathering feedback, validating our design decisions, and making the final refinements before production.
We are excited to put Frank into the hands of experienced users and learn from their real-world experience. This testing will carry on through the IndieGoGo campaign as well, and any final adjustments that come out of it will go into the product that ships to backers. We would rather keep improving it in the open than lock everything down too early.
If everything goes according to plan, we intend to launch the IndieGoGo campaign towards the end of the summer, most likely August. We will share more details, including the final design, features, and campaign timeline, as we get closer.
Thank you for following along so far. We look forward to sharing more soon.