Sometimes having too many ideas can be paralyzing. That's exactly where I found myself recently. However, a RISOAnimation workshop led by Kelli Anderson and a song by FKA Twigs, "Which Way," served as the spark I needed. I leaned into my decision fatigue and decided to use the track's repetitive, bouncy melody and message to inspire an editorial-style animation that blended analog and digital.
On my daily walks, I couldn't get the song out of my head, and I began visualizing the lyrics meandering across a screen. Much like FKA Twigs meanders across the city in her music video, my shapes and letters would move abstractly in a winding dance across the artboard.
As part of the workshop, Kelli outlined her process in a super simple way which provided many opportunities for exploration.
Phase 1: Storyboard & Contact Sheets
I storyboarded the animation directly in illustrator, creating 60 frames and moving the elements as desired throughout each frame. I knew I wanted this to be a looping animation, so I focused on a few words from the chorus that repeated several times, and made sure there was some overlap on when they appeared, so the graphic could be paired up to any moment of the song and still work with the pacing. As part of the workshop, these would be printed on Risograph at The Arm in NY. We were allotted 2 sheets of 11x17, and used Photoshop's contact sheet magic to determine the size of each frame according to what could fit in that space.
Phase 2: CMYK to RISO colors
Next in the process was to separate CMYK channels in Photoshop and determine which RISO ink colors to assign to each corresponding channel. This was an interesting challenge as it took a bit of guesswork and forethought as to how the colors could interact with each other for the final result. Kelli shared resources like this color library for visualizing and testing out some color interactions, but at the end of the day, this the Risograph analog process requires you to loosen your creative grip and welcome surprises! I decided to remove the black altogether, and replace Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, with Mint Green, Fluorescent Pink, and Sunflower.
Phase 3: Printing & Scanning
After Kelli so graciously printed all of our 20 or so sets of contact sheets for our class, she scanned them in and color-corrected as needed. Using Photoshop again, I created layers for each frame, and stitched them together using the frame animation feature in Photoshop.
Final Result
I'm so happy with how this animation came out and would love to use this process again for more editorial work! Something about the little artifacts and imperfections that come from the risograph add an element of life and humanity into the animation that I really enjoy.
