Cut Paper Animation

Our cut paper animation was based around a ghost, who accidentally scares a little boy, then apologises. The idea itself had nothing to do with any of our chosen stories, but we felt that it would be better to do an unlinked one rather than try and merge all of our stories together as they were so different.

The style of the animation itself was loosely based on on 'The Adventures of Prince Achmed' An extremely old animation (it was made in 1926!) that uses paper cut outs to tell it's story. And although ours wasn't as detailed or refined as that animation, the basic principle is still the same.

Our ghost animation itself was quite tricky to make, as there quite a few parts to each frame and cutting out each piece of paper was tricky in keeping everything together, and it required a bit of verbal planning to make sure everything went right within each shot. I think I would have enjoyed making the animation more if it wasn't so complicated, although I did like creating the characters for the shots and making sure each little detail was as close to perfect as we were going to get.

Personally, I found it quite clunky, no matter how many frames we tried to include, and the paper itself was quite crude looking, despite that being the very aim, creating a simplistic animation. I just don't think it was to my personal taste where animation is concerned. But despite this, it worked well for what we were able to do, and although it was tough to make, it was also fun and we were able to create a simple story and get it across effectively. To improve for the next time, I feel that we could go on to make more solid and neat looking props for the animation and include more frames, but I feel like we did a good job overall.

After making our large animation, I went on to make a smaller one, with only one prop that floated a little around the page. It was a very simple and basic animation, but I like how it turned out. Using only two pieces of paper, an exacto knife and a camera, it's funny how an animation can be made effectively.

I think it was a valuable experimentation, as I found that, even though I wasn't the most fond of the style of animation, I was still able to use it some what effectively.