Brain Hamsters

So, uh

Sam Neill passed away.

A lot of people know him as Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, but Sam Neill has an incredible catalogue of film and television, stretching back to 1975 on the big screen, but he cut his teeth in university productions of Shakespearean dramas.

All this to say, Sam Neill never let himself get pigeonholed as an actor. He was an incredibly versatile actor with a plethora of roles and genres to his name.

And that's not even touching upon his interests outside of acting. He was a passionate vintner (of the Two Paddocks winery) and an outspoken environmentalist who frequently spoke out against political policy that negatively affected indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand.

Jurassic Park is an incredible film, and I know many people have fond memories of the original trilogy.

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

So to answer some questions, yeah this is all traditionally made! Its composited digitally and the two animations are layered on top of each other, but the individual frames are physical drawings. In fact, here the are!

I however did not make the animation rough traditionally. That I did on TVPaint, and then printed out. Luckily for me, my oil pastels were opaque enough to layer over the printed ink without letting any through. This is the original animation:

The frames themselves are rendered on A4 paper and are quite detailed.

Once I had finished all 27 frames, I scanned them, and put them back in TVPaint to align the animation (by using that little cross in the corner) and edit out some scanning errors as well as fill in the rest of the black for the background. I ended up with this:

THEN I decided that I wasn't satisfied yet, and wanted to try out some alcohol markers. This animation I made on paper first, before rendering with the markers.

This is a non comprehensive look at the frames. Alcohol marker stains through any paper it's placed on, so the pencil frames ended up getting marked, as you can see in the image to the right. I ended up duplicating and mirroring the animation, and got this:

Then I decided it might be cool to use the scan cleaner function to remove the white of the paper, and layer this animation over the other one. Which is how we ended up with this:

A realization.

All of this is pretty simple and easy to do so long as you have a printer/scanner, and even if you don't, all you need to do paper animation is a pegboard, ideally a light table, but in a pinch you can just hold your paper up to a window to see the frame behind it.

I'm really touched by everyone who's said they've been inspired to animate because of me, I encourage it!!! Animation can be fun and experimental and weird, and it's a deeply deeply rewarding artform. So please get out there and mess around with paper and make some animations. Compile your images on gif makers, or Firealpaca, you can do it even without fancy software too!

you are in the medieval era and you have this role!