I had been meaning to make my own riso animation ever since 2024 (s/o Noah Burns), and I finally got around to it!

what’s a riso?

If anything, a riso animation can be ‘reproduced’ digitally, but in an age where we have steadily surrounded ourselves with technology, returning back to analogue felt apt.

initial plans

Originally I had planned for the ‘pale blue dot’ animation to be the one printed on the riso, but I had forgotten about one simple rule. Time, and FPS (frames per second). Animations typically done on After Effects (AE) are 24 FPS, meaning for every second, 24 frames are shown sequentially. Said planned animation was 49 seconds long- even if I halved it to 12 FPS, I would have 588 frames.

It doesn’t sound bad, until you think about the whole process of an analogue animation. With math, I’d print* out around 34 pages, scan each one, print it out, then rescan it back in, then sequence it frame by frame to complete the animation. That would make the process even more painstaking than it already was going to be.

I instead settled on a 11s animation of my logo, which thankfully came out to only 142 frames (9 pages).

(*There’s a way to send it straight to the risograph so you don’t have to print it and scan, but I haven’t learned that way yet)

the setup

First, AE. Exported out the animation on a PNG sequence and then it was off to formatting. I first tried the automated way on Photoshop (File>Automate>Contact Sheet II), but lowkey math scared me off (my brain at that point could not compute how to fit many 1920×1080 rectangles on one 11x17in sheet).

With the help of my professor (s/o Tom Tate), we landed on using InDesign and using the Place (Image) function and manually drag and drop on each page.

After that, time for print one. Oh- I almost forgot to mention- label your sheets! Especially if you have sheets that are basically the same thing… Keeping everything in order helps you later so the last half of the process goes smoothly.

time for the riso

Since the riso’s main purpose is for printing out many sheets of paper fast, scanning first starts with creating a master (like a master copy).

After the master is created, it’ll automatically switch over to printing. I opted to print 2 copies of each page, so if something went wrong on either print, I’d have a fallback.

now the monotonous part

Scanning…learn from my mistakes.

I then bumped it up to 300 DPI, which is typically what you save an 11×17 image to print out as.

Lee, how did you not learn… Each page has 16 INDIVIDUAL prints on it… Again, the quality was not up to my standard. I looked at my options. With the EPSON scanner I was using, I had the option to run it at 800 DPI.

The scan took a While, but I had achieved the quality I had been looking for. Unfortunately for me, I had probably spent around an hour and a half just scanning.

To compromise for my sanity, at 600 DPI, each scan roughly took 2 minutes and 43 seconds. I finally struck at the balance I needed.

back into the computer

After everything being labor intensive, it was time again for another labor intensive process. Moving each frame accordingly, framing it, and then sequencing it all together. I ran into a slight issue here as well, since a smaller follow-through motion of ‘lee’ falling isn’t as noticeable in the riso animation. I trouble-shot and aligned the frames with the OG animation, but if I had to guess, the ever-moving riso texture overpowers the small subtleness. Something to keep in mind for next time.

and voila

Here’s the final riso animation!

comparison of digital to riso

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Delving into a more analogue process was a fun break from all the digital I’ve been working in! Now that I’ve learned from my errors, the second time around will be less time consuming. See you in another rendition of motion talks!