As anyone who writes about the arts will testify, in describing any art form in words you walk a fine line between alienating your reader and drawing them in.

When we see or hear something which grabs us, we want other people to get it. In doing so, we strive to communicate clearly.

With this in mind, if I was to tell you that Charlotte Prodger's first film to be shown on a cinema big screen on Monday night at the Glasgow Film Festival "will bring together digital animation, footage shot on phones, and archive footage on miniDV, and will consider ways to block, divide and reveal", I can picture a few of you spluttering into your skinny lattes. But that's what it says in the GFF brochure listing, honest!

Strip away the art-speak, though, and in Prodger, a graduate of London's Goldsmiths College and the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), you have an experimental filmmaker who, like most serious artists, has thought very long and very hard about the way she creates her art. (I almost used the word "practice" but hesitated, as it's not a word I like and I think it is largely meaningless to anyone who hasn't attended art school.)

Again, like most serious artists, Prodger's work consumes her completely. When I met her just a few days ago at artists' film support body LUX Scotland's base in Glasgow, she was slightly distracted and still deep in the final edit of Stoneymollan Trail, which will receive its world premiere on Monday night at GFT.

As she sets up an excerpt for me to view, and we admire the brand-new credits made in collaboration with her friend and fellow Generation artist Ciara Phillips, she admits she will probably be working on it up until the last minute. "It's a work comprised of multiple sources," she explains, "but it's the first time I've done a piece for a large single screen, so it's been a very interesting process for me. I'm finding it very forgiving."

Prodger is the fifth recipient of the Margaret Tait Award, which was launched in 2009 by Glasgow Film Festival (GFF). Inspired by the legacy of pioneering Orcadian filmmaker Margaret Tait, who died in 1999, the award of £10,000 aims to support experimental and innovative artists working within film and moving image, and provide a high-profile platform for them to exhibit their work and engage with a wider audience.

In 2012, a new award, the Margaret Tait Residency, was established. This award, supported by Creative Scotland and Pier Arts Centre in Orkney, gives an emerging Scottish-based artist working within film and moving image the opportunity to live and work in Orkney. The second recipient is young GSA graduate, Florrie James, whose new film, O.K. Rick, is a short noir-ish drama set on Mainland-5, a fictional island inspired by both Orkney and Shetland. It will premiere at GFT on Tuesday night.

Both Stoneymollan Trail and O.K. Rick are being screened as part of GFF's Crossing The Line programme strand, now in its fourth year. This segment of the festival aims to showcase experimental and artist films from Glasgow's vibrant contemporary art scene and further afield.

This year's Crossing The Line also offers a series of events co-curated with Glasgow-based organisations LUX Scotland, MAP magazine and the arts centre, CCA, with one-off screenings, panel discussions and pop-up events.

Tomorrow night, as a precursor to the premiere of Stoneymollan Trail, Prodger will introduce a double-bill of work by American artist and filmmaker Nancy Holt, who died last year at the age of 76. Holt created monumental land art sculptures together with film work, and has been a major influence on Prodger's film work. Following on from the screening of Holt's two seminal films Sun Tunnels and Revolve, Prodger will be in discussion with LUX Scotland's Isla Leaver-Yap.

Prodger's new film mashes up different film mediums and footage, which she shot herself, together with a voiceover which she has written and spoken herself. Having never made anything on this scale before, she says she has enjoyed the challenge of taking film shot while visiting her parents in the Middle East on a now obsolete mini-DVD camera she got in 1999, iPhone footage and YouTube material (an oddly erotically-charged video of a headless man wearing sports shorts solving a Rubic Cube puzzle) to make one seamless hour-long film for the big screen.

"A lot is shot on an iPhone," she explains. "It feels almost like an extension of the body - of your nervous system. It's intimate and I enjoy that. In contrast, I revisited the tapes I shot on the DVD camera and I don't even remember shooting a lot of that - which adds to the sense of 'other' I always try to highlight in my work. I like occupying this strange space. A lot of the film I shot back then is corrupt and, again, I quite like that. Pixel columns are created in the film, which gives it a geometric quality that hovers between order and entropy. At the same time there's a messiness to the process. Digital film also catches a lot of accidents, which I like too."

As viewers, whatever the medium - film, television, online - we are all voyeurs. This sense of accidentally homing in on the forgotten and the forgettable moments lies at the heart of Prodger's interest in both queer culture and in dead-pan ordinary culture. It's a heady mix.

Margaret Tait Award screening of Charlotte Prodger's Stoneymollan Trail is at Glasgow Film Theatre (0141 332 6535, www.glasgowfilm.org/festival) at 7pm on Monday. Free tickets are available on the day, a maximum allocation of two per person