BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – A Burlington man is encapsulating a piece of Vermont’s history and bringing it to the big screen.
Director and animator Travis Van Alstyne is using his passion to bring the tale of Romaine Tenney to life – and it all started during COVID lockdown.
“The pandemic started to hit and I had just started researching for Love of the Land. But if you back up about 20 or 30 years before that, growing up in Southern Vermont, Romaine Tenney and his story was pretty well known and kind of told as folklore,” said Van Alstyne.
That folklore is coming to life in the form of an animated short film titled Love of the Land, where Van Alstyne brings to life the tragic story of Romaine Tenney – a Vermont farmer in the 1960s who lost his farm to the development of the interstate.
“It always kind of sat with me, his story. It was really powerful and emotional. And it’s something that always was in the back of my mind,” said Van Alstyne.
The work behind the short film is nearly 4 years in the making, from researching, writing, shooting, and animating.
“Once you have the video, you can then slowly start drawing over the top of it choosing which lines you want to create, really getting a feel for the character being consistent,” said Van Alstyne.
Van Alstyne uses rotoscoping to animate – an old school method first developed in 1915 that draws over film frame by frame. Van Alstyne uses a tablet for rotoscoping, and cobbled together about 3,000 individual hand-drawn frames, taking over 1,000 hours of animation time to complete.
“I’m not using any special technology to speed it along, or anything like that. It’s literally just hand-drawn digital frame by frame,” he said.
The film’s release coincides with the 60th anniversary of Tenney’s death – something Travis says wasn’t necessarily planned when first taking on the project.
“It was kind of serendipity. Like I didn’t really plan that it would take four years or so of work to get me to this point, but it seems like yes, serendipity has brought us to this point,” he said.
The film starts its theatrical run around Vermont at the end of May.
