Cut Out Animation

Cut Out Animation

Cut Out animation is a technique for producing stop-animations by using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs. An example of Cut Out animation is below, its a paper cut out animation piece where paper has been cut into shapes for example a sun and clouds which are then coloured in to make it look realistic. 

Paper Cut Out Animation from shirlene on Vimeo.

Another example of cut out animation is South Park as you can see below, it is an animated TV series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, The characters in South Park and the props and backgrounds are all a cut out animation piece.

Finally Lotte Reiniger was a big animator back in her time, she was a specialist in silhouette animation with her husband, as you can see above is an example of her work, the cut out animation is superb, it must have took her a very long time to get perfect.This animation piece was made in 1935.

Below is a link to a short animation, myself, Jared and Ryan created, it is from cut out things from random magazines. I enjoyed doing this excercise as it was something very different to the other types of animation, however it was a little bit more difficult thinking of ideas to create a short story from the magazines. I maybe tempted to attempt this type of animation in the future however I have not yet decided. For this excercise as it was a practice we thought we'd make the storyline comical which is why Leonardo Di Caprio is being born by a random model with a body lotion as his body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPzp-tY9Bwc&feature=youtu.be

My Animation Piece

My Short Animation Film

As you can see below is a short video animation piece which I have just created, I have created this by using modelling clay to create a character. I used iStopMotion 3 to complete the task I was given, my animation was 17 seconds long as you can see. I completed this task by taking single images per every shot, each shot was 1 second long therefore there is a lot of shots in this short animation, this can be compared to big movies and TV series like Shaun The Sheep and Wallace and Gromit where there must be thousands of shots. This is how modelling clay can be used to create animation. At around 9 seconds in I selected all of it then copied and pasted then reversed it which added another part to the short animation. The camera I used is called HueHD, a clever camera which is very flexible making it a lot easier for the animation to be filmed.

Another example of modelling animation has been created by Ryan Marr, he used the same technique as I did however his animation was longer than mine therefore there are many more shots. 

Animation Characters

Animation Characters

There are many animations where characters need to be made in order for it to be complete, for example ' Postman Pat ', ' Scooby Doo ' ,'  Shaun The Sheep ' etc. I also have created an animation character with the help of modelling Plasticine with linseed oil which is added. As you can see below this is my animation character. 

There are many professional animation companies out there including a big one called Aardman, this company is well known due to it creating Wallace And Gromit, Shaun The Sheep and many advertising campaigns for other businesses such as Funky Pigeon. Aardman also created Pip and Pog, an animation very similar to Tom and Jerry, they do things to hurt / trick each other but they're always fine in the end. In this video below Pip And Pog are used in an advertisement for Dairylea Dunkers.

Another animation project was The Lego Movie, above is a very clever scene from The Lego Movie where the main character turns into a master builder and he builds a machine which helps his friends and protects them from the robots and the bad guy in the movie - ' Lord Business '.