Evaluation - Cut Out Animation

Strengths of cut out animation:

• Anyone with paper cutouts and a camera can do it
• Can create a whole world
• Has no limits

Limitations of cut out animation:

• Takes a long time to do
• Has to have a lot of frames to look smooth
• If a mistake is made it's hard to recover

For our cut out animation we decided to make people do a dance. It's a popular video meme which means that it's people doing the same thing but changing some aspects, like where it's filmed or what people look like.

Here's an example of someone doing the harlem shake.

At first we wanted to set our scene in an office, and have the workers there dance, but we couldn't find much office equipment in the magazines we were cutting out of, so we decided to change the scene to a house.

We first filmed it but the paper didn't take up the entire screen so we re filmed it. We initially wanted to have loads of characters but we decided to cut it down to just 7 because it's easier to move only 7 people rather than 20!

I think what created looks good. The character movements are smooth and I think we've created a unique style. I particularly like the head bouncing through the scene it creates a comedy aspect to the scene. The dance is also in time with the music and the music is well suited to what we were trying to achieve.

Although it was good some things we could have done better. You could see the shadows of our hands in the scene so next time we should hide our hands away and be aware of the shadows. At one point you could see my finger which again shouldn't of happened. Another thing we could've done was to make the movements more accurate, and we could've achieved that by making smaller movements when taking the pictures.

Compared to pixalation animation cut out animation is quite difficult. The main problem is the fact it's all in 2D. This makes it harder to make a scene because there's no depth in the picture so it's all in your face. Another problem is that the people can't turn around they only look left and right, so it requires more thought when moving characters around the set.

Overall I would say our scene is good but could do with those improvements to make it even better!