for this month’s amc member spotlight, we’re excited to feature neo @hannneos!
from discovering animanga in the late 2000s to teaching herself gifmaking in 2016, neo always finds her way back to editing again and again. whether she’s building templates or piecing together scenes in one hyper-focused sitting, her edits are driven by capturing her favorite moments and a love for experimenting with new ideas. read on to learn more about what inspires neo and the joy she finds in creating for her favorite animanga.
along with neo's interview, we'll be reblogging some of her creations throughout the month. make sure to show them some love!
when did you start creating for animanga? what got you into it?
I started making edits and gifs of my favorite animangas in 2016, I have had my time on and off with it. I have been into animanga since 2007ish, been on tumblr since 2010 but back then I was mainly a kpop blog and I wanted to create so I taught myself. I fell into a drought after a few years, then I caught up with my favorite shows and I felt inspired to create edits and gifs again.
what type of creations do you make? what tools or programs do you use to create them?
I mainly make gifts/edits and I use photshop 2025 and photopea if I just want to do something simple.
describe your creative process from inspiration to posting. what's your favorite part? what part's the most challenging?
It depends what I want to make, but if I want to just do gifs. I find a scene or a sequence, or a quote I really like and then I cut the video and make the gifs. If I want to make something a little more complicated I make a template first and then I find different manga cuts and anime scenes that I like and I put them all together. I can get inspired from just seeing a simple picture or scene in an anime to a whole episode, or an opening.
I do get impatient though and I am very easily distracted, so sometimes I start a project and I forget it until I magically find my way back to it. I get hyperfocused so everything I make is usually made in one sitting, which can take many hours.
what's your favorite animanga creation you've made so far? why?
I think one of my favorite ones would have to be one of the recent ones I made, I didn't submit because I had yet to join so I wasn't entierly sure if it was eligible. But I had so much fun finding all the manga pages, and making the gifs that I thought could suit it all.
what's your favorite amc challenge so far? why?
Well I haven't done that many, but I did have fun with the romance trope one because it made me go back and find favorite scenes from those shows while also realizing that I need to catch up to all the new shows coming out.
what's something that you've learned or improved since joining amc? are there any particular creators in amc that inspire you?
I think what I did in my last edit for animanga released this winter I did something new, and I am not sure how to explain it well but putting the gifs and the image in a way and having it look like sakura petals go over into the gifs. I really did like the idea, and I believe I saw an edit from animanga do something similar and I just put my own spin on it. It isn't perfect but it was fun to try.
I believe there are so many talented creators here that I admire, hanyi @ruanbaijie has such amazing coloring and makes very creative gifs of shows. tay's @misakarose coloring as well is really pleasant to look at and her gifedits are spectacular as well. sin's @mx-sinisters animanga gifs are very creative and when I see them on my feed i can't help but be amazed, and I want to try and test out my own abilities when I see what all of these people do.
what's your favorite animanga? why?
It might be a very basic answer but I really do love One Piece. The pacing might be not the best, but it's such a feel good show for me and it always manages to cheer me up one way or the other. It is one of those shows that I remember I put off for so long when I first started watching, because the animation didn't intrigue me and the artstyle seemed to be not the best. I can't rememeber what made me watch it but I remember that summer, it was awful weather and all I did was just watch One Piece and I had the time of my life. I fell in love with the world and the characters, and I couldn't help but be amazed that a singular person could really come up with all of that world building and character development. This world has sucked me into to it's orbit and I am very happy that it did.
Despite that if there is a show I always tell people to watch if they ask me for recconmendations, I always recconmend Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I loved the original show and when they remade it with better animation and they were true to the manga I was so incredibly happy. It is such an amazing story and it is one that I never fail to tell people to watch if they need something and if they havent seen it. It also has one of my favorite confession scenes of all time!
what's an animanga that you wish was more popular or you wish more people created for?
It is an old show so I understand why but I think CLANNAD After Story deserves to be watched by everyone. Sure you might have to get through CLANNAD first but the journey, there isn't a show that has ripped my heart open as much as that show and it had me crying tears of happiness and sadness.
what advice would you give to other creators or people who want to create but have not tried it yet?
Advice from me would be to just do it! If you are scared that yours isn't "good enough" or that you aren't "talented enough", I think that you need to practice to make perfect and we are all practicing still and learning new stuff everyday! And it is a little fun to see your own creations improve over time and see your own improvement!
anything else you'd like to share?
I know that there is alot of bad things happening around in the world but I want to thank everyone for creating still and finding something good and fun to hold onto despite everything. You are amazing, you deserve to be happy!
bonus question: why did you choose the character in your banner?
He was and is still my favorite anime character from One Piece, I am also collecting his cards from the TCG so I am in deep!
when i was a little girl in the mid-90s, i spent much of my time watching disney movies on vhs. at the end of those tapes, there were always trailers for other films and shows, little glimpses into worlds i didn’t know yet. one of them stayed with me. even now, i can still picture it clearly: a girl in a red straw hat, playing the saxophone.
at the time, i was completely enthralled. she seemed so incredibly cool to me, almost like someone out of a dream, and even though i only saw her for a brief moment, that image never left me.
years later, after i found my way into anime, those memories came back to me. so i searched for the only thing i could remember, typing “anime girl playing saxophone” into google. somehow, that small childhood memory led me to kimagure orange☆road — an anime from the late 80s that had been waiting for me all this time.
i still haven’t properly watched it yet, partly because it took me a long time to find a way to do so, but now i finally have the chance. i want to make my way through it slowly, make gifs along the way, and maybe, somewhere in those scenes, i’ll find the exact moments that have lived in my memory since i was a child.
maybe none of you care about this, but i still wanted to write it down. it’s one of the few nostalgic and genuinely happy memories i have from when i was little.