Paper puppets

The aim of this workshop was to create a short stop frame animation using paper puppets in a similar way to Lotte Reiniger. I worked in a group with Su, and we decided to try and make our story more dystopia themed - so it involved a sense of fear. Su created the city background whilst I cut out the paper puppet. I got confused about the perspective of the puppet as I had cut it out to be facing forward, but then realised it should be facing sideways as it can only move left and right. I modified it to make this mistake less obvious. 

Su also created a 'monster' to chase the character. We didn't want it to be too detailed, but still scary and ominous - so we decided to use hands in different colours, so it would just look like a mass of monsters chasing her.

We only had one character to create a feeling of isolation, like she was one of the few survivors in a destroyed city - trying to escape the monsters. She is walking across a bridge, when she hears the monster coming and runs away.

To create the animation we set up a camera on a large tripod on the floor - because it was difficult to get the whole thing in shot otherwise. We lay out the set underneath it, and moved the puppet frame by frame. We had some difficulty figuring how to make the puppet look like she was running properly, because we had to use blu-tac rather that wire or pins, so it doesn't look very smooth in places. The view didn't turn out very well, in that you can clearly see the space around the background - this was mainly because people kept knocking the tripod so that the camera changed position - but we could have zoomed in more and checked that the position was right for each frame. Overall though, I like the mood and story we created, I think it was fairly successful. I like the simplicity of it being flat and only silhouettes. I'm unsure if I will use this technique again, as it was very time consuming, and I found it difficult to make the movements look smooth.