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# Jackie Turpin's tennis project starts with Nadal's serve
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jackie-turpins-tennis-project-starts-with-nadals-serve/
- Published: 2026-08-26T22:23:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T22:22:59.000Z
- Description: The UCLA animator rotoscoped the swing frame by frame to test a 2D-to-3D pipeline, working the seam where drawing meets simulation.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Jackie Turpin, animation, Rotoscoping, blender, tennis, ucla, Sports, instagram

The nine seconds do a lot: Rafael Nadal's serve — the toss, the deep racket drop, the whip through contact — traced frame by frame into flat, hand-drawn shapes that move across a simple 3D ground plane. [The reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbWGC-lJ5fm/?ref=killscreen.com) is labeled a workflow test, and the caption makes it a promise: “there's been a tennis project brewing in the back of my mind,” Jackie Turpin writes, “and i feel ready to go for it.”

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The full test. Video: Jackie Turpin on Instagram

Turpin is an artist and animator who teaches in UCLA's Design Media Arts program, with [a practice](https://jackieturpin.com/?ref=killscreen.com) that already runs from performance to simulation. The test is a 2D-to-3D pipeline (the replies read it as Blender's grease pencil, the tool that lets you draw flat strokes inside three-dimensional space) and the point of rotoscoping an athlete is exactly the seam it exposes: hand-drawn motion carrying real human weight through a computed world.

That seam is load-bearing in games history. Jordan Mechner filmed family footage and traced it to give *Prince of Persia* its uncanny physical gravity, and the lineage is honored so directly that a pixel-art rotoscoping tool named itself after the trick — Killscreen covered [*Paint of Persia*](https://www.killscreen.com/learn-rotoscope-paint-persia-new-animation-tool/) back when it appeared. A tennis serve is the same experiment at higher difficulty: the most slow-motion-replayed movement in sport, familiar enough that any wrongness in the weight reads instantly.

What the tennis project becomes — game, film, installation, some hybrid of Turpin's performance and simulation work — is left open. The test suggests the interesting answer is the seam itself. Worth watching.

Animation, sport, simulation — the seams between disciplines are Killscreen's whole beat. The free newsletter tracks projects like this from first test to finished work.

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