LOTR: The Flipbook of the Rings

I mentioned in my June Changing Seasons that there was a specific reason I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on my flight back to Korea. That reason is I’ve been participating in Andymation’s Flipbook Fest 2025 ‘The Flipbook of the Rings.’

If you don’t know Andymation, Andy is a stop-motion animator who shares flipbook and animation videos on his YouTube. I’ve been subscribed to his channel for years, and while I’ve dabbled with stop motion animation, I never really got into making flipbooks. In the past I found the tediousness of drawing frame after frame too big of an obstacle.

Andy hosts a Flipbook Fest every year where people send him their flipbooks and he showcases them on his channel. This year, he announced something different for Flipbook Fest: a community project where participants send in a clip of a scene from LOTR The Fellowship of the Ring. The project is:

• The world’s largest community flipbook project
• The Fellowship of the Ring recreated as a 3-hour long flipbook animation
• Over 100,000 individual hand drawn drawings

Of those 100K+ drawings, I contributed 108 (which was two clips or about ten seconds worth). Ten seconds of animation took probably… 30-40 hours… whew. So let’s go back to the beginning.

Andy announced the project back in April, and immediately after watching the video I ran over to the website to claim a clip. Each clip came with reference PDFs of the frames which you had to print out to trace. For me, a five second clip was about 50 frames, and I claimed two clips. I also ordered the required Andymation XL flipbook paper, which arrived very quickly.

The paper has holes on the left side to secure it to the Andymation lightpad for tracing, and you can fasten your final flipbook together with the provided screws. I happened to have a lightpad my mom had found at Goodwill, so I got started tracing the frames right away.

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).

Speaking of digitization, Andy will be manually photographing over 100K frames and compiling them into the final movie! I happened to see my flipbook on the top of the stack in one of his update videos, which was exciting.

I finished the first clip while I was still in the US. Flew back to Korea, was reunited with all my art supplies, and got started on the second.

The second clip I chose (which actually comes earlier in the movie) was a bit more challenging. Back in April when I was choosing the clips, I was in my toddler portrait phase. So I chose this fun scene with hobbit children, Frodo and Gandalf right after Gandalf sets off magical fireworks.

Since this takes place during the day and the atmosphere is bright and cheerful, I chose to add color to the frames. I did some test cards with both marker and colored pencil, before ultimately settling on alcohol marker (mostly because marker was the fastest to apply). I ended up using 19 different colors for the scenes with the hobbit children!

I also had to redo a few Gandalf cuts once I saw the final flip through, as his cheek bulged out too much. This part was tricky to portray because half his face is whited out from the sun in the actual stills, but in the end I chose to fill in his face.

Unfortunately I didn’t document as much of making the second clip, but it is done and on its way to Andy. The project will understandably take months to compile, but I’ll be sure to share the final result when it’s ready.

I’m really glad I was able to take part in this project and am proud of myself for seeing it through. I had my doubts while I was in the thick of tracing the same face over and over. But the beauty of animation is it all comes together in the end. I was pleasantly surprised and proud when I saw the final result: “Wow! I made this! This is cool!”

(Friday Night Writes #6)