Reverse Mitosis is a stop motion animation created to dance the fine line between digital and tactile mediums. The full animation is composed of almost 500 individually screen printed shapes.

In order to evoke the sense that the shapes had three-dimensional depth, I created each polyhedron digitally. I rotated the shapes how I wanted them to move, image-capturing them at every incremental stage, and then screen printed the shapes onto sheets of paper. Then, I cut each frame out by hand and scanned them back into a digital space, including the imperfections from cutting and printing. Each shape then became part of a larger frame, which were stitched together in Adobe After Effects.

The entire process was exhaustingly tedious. However, the rare moments, where one can see the folded edges of the paper and the messy lines from incorrectly flooding a screen, are wonderful.

Here are several scanned sheets of the shapes after I printed and cut them, but before they were animated.

After I finished the animation, I wanted to explore the pseudo-digital effect of overlapping skeletal geometry and smooth, neon gradients, so I created a series of 8 silkscreen prints inspired by that layering.