My Time on Mulberry St — Risograph Video Art
I was awarded a grant from the NYU Tisch Initiative for Creative Research this past summer, and now that the leaves are starting to turn and the breeze is much cooler, I get to share with you the product of my research!
When I applied many many weeks ago, I had one goal in mind: make a risograph animation. I hadalready made a one second looping animation of my head spinning around, but my process was atrocious, time-consuming, and inefficient.
You can read about my initial process here. With my second attempt, I was determined to find a seamless way to translate video into risograph.
After finishing my spinning head, I reached out to Kelli Anderson (paper engineer/risograph wizard/so much more) to get some feedback on my process. She gave me some insight into her methods of risograph animation. The two most time consuming parts of my process were solved.
- Contact Sheets: I simply did not know this feature existed. You can import a series of images into photoshop and it will place them into numbered rows chronologically.
- Color separation: Why was I animating in colored layers when Photoshop could do that for me!
I wanted to start again with a short simple test project using these new tools. I animated a simple sunset in AfterEffects, focusing on making something with a color gradient since colors are so beautiful on the riso.
Practice Round
Roller Ink Riso, a print studio based in Bushwick, so graciously familiarized me with their printers and let me book studio hours so I could print myself. The first they showed me when I came was a brand new software called Spectrolite. This would be game changer for sure! The first version of this app was released in 2020, but has only recently become a staple in the riso community. In the app, you create palettes based on the true riso inks.
In a test with cute kitten using yellow, fluorescent pink, and blue, you can see how quickly I can adjust levels, try halftone and posterization and adjust opacity.
When you’re done, you’re left with 3 PDFs or PNGs labeled as the color they’re supposed to be print as. For the simple sunset animation test, I was able to quickly export the three pages and print them on the machine!
I scanned the best prints and sequenced them on a Photoshop timeline. I decided to try sequencing in Photoshop instead of Adobe Animate just to try. I liked working this way much better than in Animate because I’m able to adjust levels and edit layers in a way I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Since I didn’t need to draw, Animate wasn’t really serving that much of a purpose. Here is what I ended up with.
What I really love about this one is the texture. These dots are a great example of how the risograph naturally generates this gorgeous noise. I didn’t have any texture in my original file, it was pure vector. What I didn’t love about this was how dull the pink showed up on the scans. In these photographed print images, the pink is much closer to how it looks in real life:
According to the HP printer website, “Fluorescent highlighter inks tend to reflect more light than that which is absorbed by the paper source. This reflection may cause the image to not show up as well as non-fluorescent colors depending upon the scanner/MFP being used.” I was pretty disappointed to discover this since I’m so drawn to bright pinks.
Conclusions
I learned quite a bit from the process of creating my practice sunset. For the next try, I would make sure to:
- Use Spectrolite for color separation
- Avoid Fluorescent pink
- Leave plenty of room in my contact sheet so I could turn it into a flip book when I’m done
- Lower frame rate so I can print more of the story in fewer contact sheets
The Final Project
In my research, I originally just wanted to push the limitations of the risograph printer with animation. While printing animation frames and creating flip books isn’t unheard of, it certainly is a less practiced method of video art. I was simply hoping to better understand the use of the risograph printer for animation and video, maybe developing new techniques along the way.
As I drafted some other animation ideas, however, I had a longing to make something more meaningful than a pretty sunset. I was also grappling with what kind of paper to use. It may sound small, but there are so many paper options! As I jotted down ideas in my notebook, the idea came to me! What if I used my notebook paper? And printed write on top of my writing? I flipped through my old planners and notes and decided I wanted to try printing on the pages of my 2021 moleskine planner. I’m a huge proponent for checklists and calendars and by the end of the year, my planners a filled from top to bottom, front to back. I flipped through it, thinking about my experiences from that year, how much growth and discovery I went through. I found footage on my phone from walking on the street and that it would be sweet little momento to the year I first lived on my own in New York City on Mulberry St. I thought of the friends I made, the art I made, the love and overwhelming support I received. Yes, this is what I would make my risograph project about! My Time on Mulberry St!
The Process
I began by ripping the seams from my planner. It was emotionally difficult to let go of the book. I like to keep all of my finished planners stacked.
The size of the paper was 15" x 9.25".
Then, I organized the videos in AfterEffects. I also decided to extract the sound waves from the videos as a visual display of city street sounds.
I lowered the frame rate of the video so I could see more scenes in a shorter amount of time. I had a total of 48 frames. This would be the most amount I’ve frames I’ve worked with yet. Unfortunately, lowering the frame rate would end up working against me, but I’ll get to that later.
Next, I created my contact sheets. Instead of using the automated contact sheet fuction in Photoshop, I made my own template because I wanted to have guidelines for when I turned it into a flip book.
I then brought each sheet into Spectrolite. I decided to use blue and red inks since the frames I had seemed to mostly have reds and blues.
It was really cool seeing the bright colors printed over my old writing. The quality of the moleskin was really nice as well.
I printed enough copies to make five flipbooks, plus some buffer for mistakes and misprints. I cut them down enough to fit in my scanner and scanned.
I also included the misprints. I thought they might be cool to include as a glitchy effect in the final video.
Before I started editing, I cut the rest of the frames out.
Let’s Get Digital
I started by cutting out each frame in photoshop, then pasting it into a separate file with a timeline. Each picture was a new layer. New Layers became sequential frames.
I exported the video straight out of photoshop as an .MOV into AfterEffects where I could put the ambient street sounds back on it and some other audio.
The Flip book
Once all the pages were cut out, I realized 48 pages was really not a good flip book. It was too short and hard to get going. Instead, I stacked 4 of the stacks on top of each other to make one big flip book. I also included a bunch of misprints.
Binding
I’ve never bound a book before, but I’ve always loved watching book arts videos. I referred to this site for different binding techniques and went with Japanese stab binding.
In the photo, you can see a drill. That’s because I drilled through my stack with a teeny tiny drill bit before I threaded the floss through. I finished it off with super glue on the top edge.
The Cover
I purchased a thick black paper that would bend with my flipbook, but still protect the inside. I designed a cover to be laser cut:
The map would be engraved on the back with my name and title cut out on the front.
Ok — The flip book isn’t that cool. You can really tell its a sequenced moving image. This is where reducing the frames hurt me. But as a personal item, its pretty sentimental considering its my old planner planner paper with my writing from the year. In fact, the planner has become more sentimental to me than it was as a book. It’s not like I was really going to read through it anyway. Now, it’s part of a feeling.
The Video
And now I present the final video piece!
As I began the tedious process, I asked myself: “Why would I go through all this trouble for a short video when I could just…take a video?” There are even photoshop templates made to replicate the look of the riso. Why shouldn’t I just use this filter?
The conclusion I came up with after all this time is that the process of printing, cutting, scanning, gluing, testing, failing, is more valuable than the final product. Every misaligned layer and fingerprint smeared on the page is an indication of the artists’ touch. As we move forward into a technologically centered future, how can I incorporate analog techniques into my work? In a way that doesn’t just “look cool”, but serves a purpose.
‘My Time on Mulberry St’ became a very sentimental project for me. I ditched traditional copy paper and printed on pages from my 2021 year planner. I printed on top of old notes, recipes, to-do lists and scribbles. I am deeply attached to my old notebooks. When I decided to tear out the pages, I felt like I was tearing out a piece of my heart. After printing on top of the pages, I now feel as though the value of my mundane daily writing is even greater, preserving a past version of myself better than it would be collecting dust on a shelf.
I reflected on the year and my many coming-of-age experiences on Mulberry St as I scanned each frame after printing and prepped them to be digitized and turned into a flip book.
I can’t say I’ve crafted anything more personal in my artistic career thus far. The intimacy of my private notes and footage from the time period in combination with the finger print smudges from the riso piece together a really special final product. For this reason, I do not believe the same effect, or at least the same feeling, could be replicated digitally only. It’s all about the feeling.
Looking Forward
Now that I’ve got the process fully under my belt, I look forward to just making more on the printer. I have new interest in printing on found materials and recycled papers. I’m so grateful for the support from the research fund and I wouldn’t have been able to spend time fiddling with the machine without. I hope my findings become useful to anyone else interested in print/video!
