The Flipbook of the Rings
For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually drawn pages. A couple of months ago, they released the first 11 minutes:
It’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t include the audio or music from the movie, but I bet you could mute the sound on this and simultaneously play the actual movie for the sound. Here’s an earlier sneak peek at some of the scenes:
This artist wrote about their participation in the project; they contributed 108 drawings that amounted to roughly 10 seconds of animation (and took 30-40 hours to do):
The first clip I claimed was a pretty iconic scene from the beginning of the movie. I chose to render it in pencil as it’s night time and I felt black and white would be more dramatic. As I worked through the frames, I did worry that the subtle variances in shading would make the clip look disjointed, but I think it adds a cool movement to the scene. There is that rough, quirky imperfection to hand drawing. You can see the final result with comparison below (digitized and compiled by Andy).
Here’s a clip of that scene:
I can’t wait to see the finished product — I hope they’re able to release it online.
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The Waking Hobbit
Wow wow wow, I hope they release it and can figure out a way to include audio!
this is one of the coolest things i've ever seen. i love how you can see everyone's style and technique in there — some people did more of a rotoscope kind of thing, other people were just winging it, and yet it all hangs together. beautiful work through and through. love the little bits of personal additions (like the barking dog on the map or the animated signatures).
part of it is how well-filmed these movies are, too. this is just brilliant work adding to the legacy of brilliant work.
As someone who has never seen these movies and doesn’t have a huge amount of interest in doing so (I’m sorry, I know that puts me in a tiny minority here at KDO) I nevertheless would watch the shit out of this illustrated version.
Interesting Fact (well not that interesting but still): The studio is not "Warner Brothers" - the legal name is "Warner Bros." I learned that doing business with them years ago and the contract had to be corrected. According to the lawyer I was working with, early on, they got sued by some other Warner brothers who already had the name for their family business.
Similar, but more up my alley is this Aesop Rock music video from 4 years ago.
He drew every of the near 1500 frames.
Full of 1 frame easter eggs, etc.
Averaged 6 seconds of animation per day during the process
And per usual the his lyrics are 'dense' too.
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