An epic FFVII risograph animation tribute!!
and upcoming shows, workshops, and a special artist talk with Short Run :)
This past weekend was Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, and all of the fanatics descended upon our fair town…us included. We love an excuse to create fanart and to nerd out with like-minded obsessives.
Zack decided to pay tribute to one of his favorite childhood games, Final Fantasy VII, which aligned perfectly with the release of the re-make, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, on the first day of the con. Let’s call it Riso-Birth, though.
We printed this animation with three colors - Black, Mint, and Sunflower. The combo of 100% Mint and 60% sunflower created an incredible green reminiscent of mako, the manifestation of the planet’s life force in FFVII 🤓. There are a total of 177 frames printed on 9 sheets of paper. This is the most ambitious risograph animation project we’ve tackled so far, and we are really happy with the results. For those wondering, Zack worked for about 350 hours on the animation!
You can watch some behind-the-scenes footage of the process above - from thumbnail animation to tie-downs and then the finished digital animation to the risograph printed scans. The uncompressed file has so much print information that becomes blurry in video uploads, so compression is an issue that we want to explore more in our next project. We currently scan the prints at 800dpi, but we’ll experiment with scanning at an even larger dpi, for starters 😳
You can purchase the entire set of printed sheets, collected in a silkscreened folder here. The clear folder is silkscreened with white ink and an insert printed with gray ink on black paper creates the look of an old school animation cel. We made an edition of 50 for this bundle and each set is signed and numbered by Zack.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by at ECCC! We felt a lot of love for our work and Zack’s new animation.
We have a few more events coming up this month! If you’re in Seattle, come by the Short Run/Paper Press Punch studio in Georgetown on Saturday, March 9th at 1pm for our SHOW UP Artist Talk. This is a small gathering where we’ll talk about our influences, process, and what we are dreaming up for future projects. Short Run is one of the best comix shows around and we are really honored to host a talk in their space.
After that, we are headed to NYC for MoCCA and a few animation workshops at Lucky Risograph! We love visiting New York can’t wait to catch up with old and new faces. If you can make it to Lucky Risograph’s studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, we are teaching two workshops on March 13th and March 17th. Purchase tickets here. We’ll bring the FFVII bundle to MoCCA!
We’ll be back in Seattle on March 23rd and 24th for another riso animation workshop in collaboration with Cadence Video Poetry Festival at Northwest Film Forum. We’ll work with Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke to create a visual interpretation of a poem using riso animation and video looping techniques. Sign up here.
And that should wrap up March…unless we get into Sakura-Con 😂
We also opened up ticket sales for our first virtual workshop of the year on April 6th.
Upcoming schedule
March 9th - 1pm - Seattle, WA - SHOW UP Artist Talk
March 15th or 17th - Brooklyn, NY - Print n Play Workshop @ Lucky Risograph
March 16th - 17th - New York, NY - MoCCA Comic Arts Festival
March 23rd - 24th - Seattle, WA - Cadence Video Poetry Workshop
April 6th - Virtual Riso Animation Workshop
Hope to see you soon!
🖤 Love Alex + Zack 🖤
Oh my gosh your stuff is so freaking cool. The prints, the zines, the animations. What?! So good! More please!