Tuesday, 14 June 2016

Cut out animation

Cut out animation is a technique for producing stop-animations by applying flat characters, backgrounds, objects, or any flat prop you can find, this is only 2D animation. The materials used would be from paper, card, stiff fabric,or even photographs which can be found in books, magazines or catalogues or any item that has photos featured in it. Cut out animation has evolved over the years to the point where now it can even be done by computer animation which appear as cut out animation, this is by vector graphics taking the place of physically cut materials. South park was originally a cut out animation but in its second episode was changed to computer software.Similar to the other animation techniques it does not need a huge amount of equipment, for example you need a camera, tripod and the paper you will use to produce the animation, to set up scissors may be needed to cut out the objects you want. One famous director who uses this technique is Terry Gilliam, he started his career by being a strip cartoonist and became famous for "Monty Python and the holy Grail"which used the cut out animation for comedic purposes and used sound effects and music to add more creativity to the animations. The first use of Cut out animation was for a film in 1926 but was not used again until the 1960's with "Heaven and earth magic" , then lefty and "Go There, don't know where. Then many shorts were released by the mentioned Terry Gillian, however this genre never had a huge success and not many films or shows were presented in the cut out animation format. However on major film that used elements of the cut out animation was the south park movie which was computer generation to imitate cut out animation. This helped with the type of film it was and it wanted to be unique also it had an r rating which was very unusual for an animate film, Though overall as a style of animation it has never been a major use in recent years more used as an extra such as in Juno or in a music video. I created a cut out animation short which was a fun process and can let you be creative in the objects you choose but there is a limitation as you can only move the objects up down or around as there is no 3D motion involved. The benefit of cut out is that you can get realistic looking objects or people and create some humour out of it. One huge postitve I realised was the mouth  as you can adjust the jaw incredibly easily to have it appear the character is talking once sound was added.

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