Cut Out Animation

Cut-out animation is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: cut-out shapes arranged on a flat surface, and manually moved and repositioned to simulate animation. Cut-outs can be colored paper, white paper with drawings on it, even photographs, and can be completely flat or can sometimes be 3D objects, though this ventures away from cut-out animation and into stop-motion animation. Many often use cut-out animation to make photographs of people and animals to make it seem as if they're talking or moving, often resulting in a 2D marionette effect.

The actual step-by-step process of cut-out animation is somewhat related to the process in stop-motion animation, and can be just as tedious because it requires manual intervention. First the scene is created using cut-out objects, laid out flat against the background image. This scene is created on an animation stand, with the rostrum camera positioned above the animation stand and positioned to pan or zoom over the scene. The camera is used to capture the scene created with the cut-out shapes.

Here are the examples we looked at in class:

Lotte Reineger - The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926:

Yuriy Norshteyn - Tale of Tales 1979:

Hedgehog in the Fog 1975:

The Overcoat:

A modern example of this style of animation is the famous cartoon show 'South Park'. Despite their incredibly simple animation style the show is a huge success and is currently on it's 17th season. They have recently made an attempt to modernise their iconic intro by incorporating 3D techniques along with the cut-out style to create an interesting new look:

It's been met with mixed reviews but I think that the mix of cut-out and 3D works really well to create a modern take on a dated technique.

My Attempt

I created this character in Illustrator, keeping each part of the body on separate layers. I then imported the layers into After Effects and moved the anchor points of each limb in the appropriate place to mimic the joints of the character. The body parts were then parented to keep them together. For example: Hand to Forearm - Forearm to Upper Arm - Upper Arm to Torso, this is essentially like pinning the pieces together.

I found this quite difficult due to the limited movements possible with this method. Once I created a fairly smooth walk cycle I decided to create a quick background in Illustrator to make the test more interesting. I also added a camera in After Effects to track with the character just to make it more believable. I'm reasonably pleased with what I came up with but I'm not fond of this technique as I find it too limiting.