Cutout Animation

Cutout animation

Cutout animation is a form of animation using paper or other cutouts forming the shape of characters that are then animated in a top down fashion.

A very popular show that uses this style of animation is south park.

South Park was originally intended for just a christmas card, but became an animation in 1992 and was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It started with an animated shot titled "The Spirit of Christmas".

The animation was made using construction paper cutouts with stop motion, and features prototypes of the south park characters.

Another popular cutout animation show is Blues Clues, this one is targeted at young children, rather than the more adult South Park. 

Blues clues is children's show that premiered on September 8th 1996, on the channel Nickelodeon and ran for ten years until August 6 2006.
The producers were  Angela Santomero, Todd Kessler and Traci Paige Johnson combined concepts  learned from childhood development and early childhood education research, and modern animation techniques to create Blues Clues.

Blues Clues was the first cutout animation series for preschoolers and resembled a story book with its use of primary colours and construction paper shapes of familiar objects with varied colours and textures. Its home setting was familiar to children but was unlike any other children's show out at the time.

The next cutout animation is another childrens show called Crystal Tipps and Alistair, this was a UK animation produced by the BBC featuring two characters, one called Crystal Tipps, a young girl, and her dog, Alistair, as well as her friends Birdie and Butterfly.It was a 5 minute 50 episode series with a 20 minute christmas special, first shown between 1971 and 1974.
It was created by Hilary Hayton and Graham McCallum. Michael Grafton-Robinson, a BBC producer went independent setting up Q3 of London to produce the series.

The series had no dialog but was accompanied by a musical backing track composed by Paul Reade.

Here is a episode from the show:

Blog Check List

What I need to do to finish this assignment:

History of Animation
1970s - Present

Explanations on:
Pixilation
Cutout Animation
Time Lapse
Model Based
Cel Based

Cutout Animation Completion!

Here is our finished animation:

Long Neck African Plain Walker Cheeseburger Fiasco!

It is a Girrafe eating a cheeseburger from a tree in the African plains.

End of lesson Evaluation

Today we have organized our cutouts so that we can begin animating next week.

Where we are thus far.

So far we are cutting out the paper cutouts for the cutout animation, hopefully we will be ready to animate by next week.

Making a cutout animation

For our cutout animation, we are going to do a giraffe eating cheeseburgers off of a tree. 

Here is the giraffe we will cutout:

And out background will be this:

And the tree will be this:

And here is a cheeseburger:

Next time, I will be actually making the animation using these things.

Red N Pink

Red N Pink

I have made an animation in iStopMotion using the models I had made previously.

The red character is enjoying his day, until he notices Pink, and chases after her because he wants to

be with her.

Here is the finished product:

Making a stop motion animation

Over the next two weeks we will be making a stop motion animation using plasticine models that we have made ourselves. I have decided to go with simplistic models because I care more about producing something well animated than making amazing models, so to cut down on time and difficulty while animating I've gone for a simplistic style, though I hope that doing so will help me produce something good.

Here is a picture of the models I have made:

The pink one has a bow on their head, and the red one is plain.

Rob Swimming

Pixilation Animation

Today we did a pixilation animation in the classroom.

Pixilation is a form of animation were people move around on screen but not in the usual way like a video.
It works in the same way as most other animation, pictures or "frames" are played back at a certain speed, for example 12 frames a second this tricks the brain into seeing movement.

It is a form of stop motion animation, stop motion is often used to make inanimate objects move around like they are alive.

This one is set at 12 frames per second, which means that they are 12 frames for every second, if we were doing an actual project, we would take it up to 30 frames per second.

We exported it as a MOV as this is a good format to upload to youtube.

I am uploading it to my college youtube account so that I can post it on my blog as it allows you to embed video.

Here is the video that we made:

Animation in Television in the 1950s to 1970s

Animation in Television in the 1950s to 1970s

Hanna Barbera

Hanna Barbera was an American animation studio that was incredibly popular in North America for around three decades, the company was originally founded in 1957, and created series such as, Top cat, The Jetsons, The Hair Bear Bunch, Wacky Racers, but they started it all with The Flintstones.

Here is the intro to The Wacky Racers:

Looney Tunes

The Looney Tunes was created by Warner Bros, it's first official release was in the 1930s but really caught on in the 1950s with the introduction of the Television.

The series contains some of the most well known cartoon characters in history, such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Tweety Bird.

Here is one of the episodes staring Daffy Duck:

Oliver Postgate

Oliver Postgate was a British writer and puppeteer of some of the most popular children's shows in the UK, he created shows such as Pigwings, Pogles and Bagpuss.

Here is the intro to Bagpuss:

Creature Feature

"Creature Features" were incredibly popular in the 1950s, they were movies often involving large monsters made using animation and various other techniques. One of the most popular ones is Godzilla,  who became a pop-culture icon, featureing in many other films after that.

Here is a the trailer for the 1954 Godzilla :

Animation - 1930 - 50s

I have been asked to talk about the different styles and techniques used in animation during the 1930s to 50s, people were still experimenting with different animation styles and techniques.

To start with I was asked to look into Normal McLaren, a canadian animator who did lots of experimental work with film reels to create some rather abstract films. 

This one he made by drawing onto the film, he then made music to go over it afterwards.

Secondly there is a stop motion animation made with clay characters called Gumby, it was made by moving the figures a very small amount, and taking a new picture each time. Gumby was a popular television show. Here is a clip made as a pitch to a TV network before Gumby was made.

Tom and Jerry is a very popular cartoon series created by William Hanna and Joseph Berbera, back around 1940. It was made by drawing each frame individually.

Betty Boop, created by Max Fleischer in 1930

Three early animators

Three early animators

Georges Méliès

I have been told to look into three early animators, first of which is George Melies, he was a french illusionist and film maker who pioneered a lot of technical and narrative developments in cinema.

He accidentally discovered substitution stop trick, which is when something seemingly disappears and reappears somewhere else in the scene. 

His most famous works are "Trip to the moon" which involves some people creating and traveling in a space ship to the moon, and then exploring it, and the other was "The Impossible Voyage", both of which involve some sort of space travel, and are considered some of the earliest sifi films, though they can seem more like fantasy.

Here is an example of his work:

Winsor McCay

 

Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator, who was most famous for his comic Little Nemo. His work outshone his contemporaries, and set the standard for animation followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades.

He is most famous for his animation called "Gertie the Dinosaur" which was about a dinosaur that he would give commands to, it is considered the first original character with personality created for an animation, as she would follow commands, disobey them, cry when she was scolded and even give Winsor a ride on her back when he steps into the animation.

Here is a video of Gertie the Dinosaur:

Lotte Reiniger

Lotte Reiniger was a silhouette animator and film director, she created short movies using puppets.

One of her most famous animations is called "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" which was made with cutouts of cardboard and thin sheets. 

The plot is that with the help of Aladdin, The fairy of fiery mountain and a magic horse, the title character reclaims the magic lamp and concours the African sorcerer. 

Here it is bellow:

Persistence of vision

Persistence of vision

Persistence of vision is the theory that your eyes keeps the image your eye has captured for half a second, this means that everything we see is a suitable blend of everything we see now and everything we see fractions of a second ago, this can explain the blurry vision people see when something is moving fast.

Example of persistence of vision.

A Zoetrope is an example of persistence of vision, this is because it is a series of images in a circle, inside a cardboard circle with slots cut into it, the idea is that you look through the slits and spin the circle, because of the speed in which you see the pictures spin around, it appears as if the image is movie, this could be because of persistence of vision.

Here is an example.

Fighting Stop motion! :D

Fighting Stop Motion

Me, Jacob and Lewis worked together on this stop motion of two figures fighting.