French filmmaker and experimental artist Thomas Blanchard has a talent for revealing hidden worlds in astonishing detail. His latest project ‘CRYSTALS’, a hypnotic visual film created from over 150,000 macro photographs of potassium phosphate crystallisations, blurs the boundary between science and art. In this interview, we explore the meticulous patience behind the process, the visual poetry of slow transformation, and how Shoreditch’s creative community might find inspiration in this luminous microcosm.
What first drew you to the crystallization process as a subject for such an intensive visual exploration?
As an artist, I’ve always been drawn to timelapse works. I’ve made several of them, notably around flowers or carnivorous plants.
Anything that requires patience and time produces rare and precious works. I started working on crystallization a few years ago, experimenting with sodium acetate. Although the result is very aesthetic, the reactions are almost instantaneous – which, in my opinion, limits the creative possibilities.
I discovered potassium phosphate in a children’s game. I’m sure you’re familiar with those magical little cherry blossom (sakura) trees.
I was amazed by the rendering, and immediately understood the creative potential offered by a solution saturated with potassium phosphate thanks to capillarity, crystallizations are fascinating and visually very rich.
You captured nearly 150,000 macro photographs over seven months—what did this extreme commitment reveal to you about time, patience, and transformation?
In seven months, I took around 150,000 photos for my crystallization time-lapses. One of my cameras had to be repaired due to heavy use associated with this project. For a timelapse sequence, I had to programme my cameras to take 1 photo every minute for 16 hours. Obviously there were a lot of botched shots. I set off with no specific knowledge of potassium phosphate crystallization.
The first month was entirely devoted to experimentation. I tested different saturation formulas in Petri dishes with blotting paper, with the idea of recreating sakura trees but on a flat surface. It was while observing some of the time lapse shots that I realized that the potassium phosphate could sometimes spill out of the Petri dish, spilling all around. That’s how I discovered that it could propagate in the form of fractals and dendrites. From that moment on, just over a month after starting, the project took on a whole new dimension. I realized that I could start to control several factors in the crystallization process.
Crystallizations feel both scientific and otherworldly. How did you balance technical precision with poetic expression in your visual storytelling?
Through experimentation, I understood two important things for developing my project. First, the saturation level of my liquids varied the shapes of the crystals. But I also discovered that the papers I used played a key role. Their thickness, texture, and absorption capacity directly influenced the final result. These parameters allowed me to create visually very different crystallizations. Sometimes, fractals appeared, sometimes you could see forests of small trees, or even braided fabric.
I also tried coloring the crystals, but it was a failure. I tried to form letters or precise shapes, with varying results. I should revisit these creative avenues one day, because they have real potential. All these possibilities naturally led me to create a film longer than six minutes.
It’s really fascinating.
Can you talk us through your macro photography setup—what challenges did you face working at such microscopic scales for so long?
I work in a small 15 m² studio, equipped with three shelves filled with all sorts of products I use for my various projects. You can find everything there: alcohol inks, ferrofluid, and of course, potassium phosphate. I set up a large table with a rigid frame that supports my top-shot cameras. For this project, the setup was relatively simple: I placed my Petri dishes under the camera, facing downwards, on a sheet of black paper, with grazing light.
As for the difficulties, the first was related to cumulus-type effects. It was very difficult to anticipate the vertical growth of the crystals, and I often lost focus. The second was framing. My shots didn’t guarantee crystallization would develop in the frame. It was quite random, but with experience, I learned to maximize my chances of obtaining sequences of images.
How did the materials you used, like potassium phosphate and Petri dishes, influence the visual behavior and unpredictability of each sequence?
Potassium phosphate must be absorbed to reveal its most beautiful forms and be able to move. Based on this observation, it’s enough to play with the flexibility, rigidity, and texture of the paper used to influence the crystallization behavior.
The Petri dishes represent more of a constraint for the potassium phosphate, but a necessary constraint that it must overcome to develop differently on the paper.
There are sequences in my film where I see myself placing a large drop of liquid on my paper. The result is very different when the potassium phosphate is placed directly on the paper and when it manages to pass over the Petri dish to reach the paper.
Sound design is a major component of this project. How did you go about matching sonic textures to the organic movement of the crystals?
I’ve made many macro videos in the past. What interests me and piques my curiosity is the development of materials and textures.
I’ve long worked on accompanying music created specifically for these projects by talented composers. Today, I feel the need to go further. I want my material transformations to be accompanied by sound design that amplifies the viewer’s immersion. To simulate the sounds of crystallization, its cracking, and its movement, I mainly used the sounds of falling rocks. I integrated them into my editing, trying to match the crystal formation movements as best as possible. There’s still work to be done on this front. This is a first for me, but I hope to improve in the future. I then asked composer Alexis Dehimi to create music that is both powerful and conducive to sound design. A tough challenge he took on brilliantly.
Many creatives in Shoreditch are fascinated by hybrid art forms. How do you hope this work speaks to artists working across science, film, and design?
I’ll answer you very frankly. With this video, I’m concretely trying to bring visual innovation. I’m trying to create a meeting between science and art. But what seems most important to me, and this is even more true today with the arrival of generative AI, capable of producing beautiful images with a few typed words, is to show how a work was conceived and created. What I deeply love when I discover an artist’s work is being able to project myself into their process, to feel the time, patience, and dedication that fueled their creative gesture. That’s what moves me. That, for me, is what makes a work truly interesting. And that’s also how I hope to engage other artists when they see my work. By making them want to explore their own approach, to take the time, to explore their ideas in depth.
After spending so long observing matter at its most intricate—how has this changed the way you see the natural world around you, even in everyday life?
I’ve been working on high-potential macro subjects for 12 years, so naturally, as soon as I walk in nature or even in the city, I notice many similarities with my research. In fact, I never let go, ha ha. What I feel is that it’s often the simplest subjects that affect me the most, depending on my sensitivity. For example, a simple crack on a building facade can make me think of a cracked desert, and that plunges me into a host of creative ideas. I’ll ask myself, how could I reproduce that in timelapse? And I’ll start looking at clay, experimenting, researching… That’s how many of my projects begin: with a visual, almost instinctive curiosity. Sometimes, when I observe the world, I think that we are trapped within a single scale of perception. I’m often amazed at how much the world of macro and even microscopy resembles aerial or spatial landscapes. We find the same structures, patterns… It’s dizzying. Another example: I was fascinated by the special effects in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, and just knowing that everything had been created manually gave me the desire to make a work subject out of it. In my own way, with more subjectivity, I recreated its visual effects using my own expertise.
