My First Project - Cut out animation

For my first animation I was quite interested in the cut out/shadow puppet techniques that we learned about such as the ones by Lotte Reiniger and wanted to try it out for my self. I decided to go for the black card and split pin style.

I made the character out of black card and printed of an image of an eye and taped it to the back of the head. I had to use a few parts to make sure there was plenty movement. The parts I used were head, upper body, waist, two parts for arms and two parts for legs, hands, feet and toes. I also coloured the split pins in black to go with the card. When I was researching on characters I liked the look of the one eyed monster and once I had drawn him out I realised I had given it a 50's style, must be all the black and white old cartoons I like coming through.

The brief was to make a movement in 12 frames so I decided to use jump. In order to get this movement I used a camera from college and took images of my cousin jumping up and back down. To transfer this to the character I used dragon to take the pictures and used a box from college with had clear shelves on so I put the picture of my cousin on the bottom shelf and lined up my character. Once the character was in place I removed the photograph and took the image. I liked using Dragon as you can use the scroll bar on Dragon so you can see the previous image and line it up with the next one. It worked out great for the jump because I could line up the feet. This was then made into a quicktime video. I then used photoshop to make it into animation. As he was an alien I thought it best to add a spaceship so I drew one and scanned it into photoshop. I fixed up the lines and coloured it. I then opened the quicktime movie into photoshop which turned it into layers meaning each frame I had to move the spaceship so it would move through out the whole animation. I then wanted to make the animation in a field but when I was researching images I came across a road and liked it, tried it, and thought I'll use that one!

I am not 100% happy with the final result, but who is with their first animation. I had meant to go back and adjust things but I thought it might be good to keep it as it is and look back at it to see my progress through out the course.