Cut Out

Cut out is an animating technique that uses flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs. Any type of material can be used to create a cut out animation.

The brief was to choose a poem, and record sound and dialogue to create an animation using the cut out method. This was the first time we used dope sheets to help work out the animating of the speech. To help use we did a practice.

This also helped us work out what was the best way of animating the speech, for use we found that instead of make a different head for each sound to keep the same head and just change the mouth.

We agreed before this project the poem we were going to use, Have a nice day by Spike Milligan. From the beginning we wanted to do a funny and humorous animation and to have fun with it.

For the storyboard we decided to follow the flow of the poem. When the disease man spoke the frame would be on him and when the drowning was speaking it would be on him. We wanted to add something at the end of the poem when the narrator speaks, and not just have his character talking. So we thought about what he says, “but apart from that, and a fire in my flat, it’s been a very nice day”. So we got thinking, why is his flat on fire? Did he burn something? Or is it on fire because the whole city is on fire? Why is the city on fire? An alien invasion?
So at the end of the poem we have the city getting burned down with ufos shooting lasers. But it still seemed as though we needed something at the end, so I suggested that the narrator gets squished by a ‘the end’ sign, and we did.

While the others were drawing and cutting out the props, characters and setting we needed, I was working out the dope sheet and how long each mouth piece had to be held for.

None of us want to voice the poem so a member of our group asked her friend Purple (its a nickname, he wishes to stay anonymous) to voice it.