While studying at NYU for my masters in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, I created a knitted animation to promote it for the Orphans Film Festival in 2024. The theme of Orphans was work and play, which is fitting for a film of a professional athlete engaging in what an audience might consider to be play. This project was my first attempt to animate with knitted fabric.
The film was created in 1891 as an early camera test. The over-saturated picture lends itself to being turned into a knitting pattern, as the film is already essentially two toned. To make it easier to knit quickly for my assignment’s deadline, I cropped the film so that just the boys torso is in the frame.
In hindsight, the process I used did not guarantee that each image had the same aspect ratio, and so the figure moves around a lot more than in the original film and stretches and compresses weirdly. I created a pattern for all 24 frames and intended to knit 12, however this was a bit too ambitious. I finished 6 blocks, which was enough to cheat the effect.
I knit the project in the round, using a process called steeking. Starting with a test knit, I was able to determine how quickly I could knit and how large the project was going to be. I used a worsted weight yarn on size 4.5mm knitting needles, and gave myself a bit of a stress injury. I won’t go into too much detail about the process, but doing this project really helped me establish a workflow for creating new designs.
Inside Baseball Knitting 
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