The hand-drawn mark, without the paper — a research project that transfers the mixed media technique into an entirely digital workflow.

It is a personal project, born without a commission, out of curiosity about a technique.

The inspiration comes from videos made with the analog mixed media technique, in which the frames of a sequence are printed and modified directly on paper with drawings, colors, scratches, cuts and collage, then digitized with a scanner and put back in sequence to rebuild the animation. I wondered whether the same effect could be achieved without going through paper.

I started from stock footage showing a group of young people playing basketball on a city court. I edited it in Premiere to an audio track of my choice, then exported the individual frames at 12 fps and imported them into Photoshop. There, with a graphics tablet and organic brushes able to reproduce the marks of pencils, scratches and wax crayons, I worked frame by frame, adding marks, lines and shapes around the characters.

I then imported the sequences into After Effects, combining them with the clips from the edit, converting the footage to black and white to make the colors of the animations stand out and adding texture and grain to emulate paper and recreate the effect of glued cut-outs.

To create these 18 seconds I worked on more than 200 frames, a process that is certainly long but keeps the look and feel of the analog process. A way to bring together the aesthetic and character of handmade work and digital tools.