Cut Out Animation Evaluation

Cut out animation – technique for producing animations using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs. Three TV shows and movies that use this form of animation are:
1) South Park.
2) Terry Gilliam's Do It Yourself Animation Show.
3) Angela Anaconda.
To create your own cut out animation you must first get a sufficient amount of source material like magazines, newspaper, card and photographs. Then you cut out anything that corresponds to the story you want to tell, maybe even segment the individual characters and objects for ease of movement. Finally you act out and record it by using still photographs and moving everything on set ever so slightly so that it looks fluid when played back, this is known as stop motion animation.

The strengths of this technique are that anyone without any real talent such as drawing can produce something of quality as everything you use is just cut out images. It is also probably the cheapest and least time consuming method of stop motion animation; because the resources needed are extremely abundant and everything comes ready-made you just to animate it.

This type of animation does have some severe draw backs, one of the most major being that the figures being used are fixed so that if you want lots of movement from one figure a lot of parts would be required to make it and matching ones can be hard to find. This leads to the problem of ruing your animation by accidently nudging a piece out of place and paper is hard to get back to exactly the same spot. Lots of individual parts will drag out the production process as moving all of them so slightly can be very time consuming. Finally you are limited to a two dimensional space and this diminishes your options for movement and distance can’t really be portrayed.

For the animation we did in class we had to base it around the theme of the Vox Pops we did for an earlier project, mine was gay rights. The original idea was to use clips from it to play over the animation however after I had completed it I couldn’t get a hold of the clips, so to give it some context I instead played ‘I want to break free’ by Queen. My animation could have been greatly improved if I had paid more attention to the set as the monitor of the computer can be seen throughout and on occasion a cut out that I’m not using is in shot. Furthermore it could have worked better if I had given it some form of story instead of just random animation. Although I am quite proud of how smoothly it all moves.