cut out animation

Cut out animation

A Cut out is a form of animation that creates stories by using paper or card cut outs. Each moving object in the animation will be a different paper cut out. The animation works by taking a picture and then moving the different parts to move how you want. Common uses of cut outs is to create characters. A character will be made by cutting out each body part. This way you can move each body part and make it look as though the character is moving. 

This is our animation. We made this by taking newspapers and magazines and cutting out images that we thought would look good in our animation. We then moved each image a tiny bit at a time to make them move. Our background is also a cut out image which we took from a newspaper. The difference with this is we stuck blue tac on the back of it so it didn't move out of place when we were moving the other cut outs.

This clip is of the TV show South Park. South Park's first episode was made in 1997 using cut outs and stop motion technology. It took around 3 months until the episode was finished. Nowadays, it is helped a long using digital animation. The south park episodes will have used a lot more cut outs so they can make their characters do more actions. An example is they will have their eyes and their pupils as cut outs so they can make their characters look around. South Park has become an immensely popular franchise with 18 seasons a feature film and even their own video game which all started out with just a few cut out paper characters.

This animation is made by Lotte Reiniger. The animation was made in 1926. It was one of the first animations created and was made entirely using cut out paper characters that were made to look like silhouettes. Reiniger made feature films using only paper cut outs. The process for this will have taken an extremely long time as the paper can only be moved ever so slightly in between shots to make it look realistic and get a good end product.