Silhouette videos

We decided we wanted our first scene to be made using silhouttes, similar to Lottie Reiniger except we used the shadows instead. We set up in the dark room with a big piece of white paper as the screen, and cardboard cutouts of buildings and people of different sizes. We attached pins to the bottom of the cutouts so they would stand up on their own. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4dqQAYbBC4

First we used an over head projecter as the light source for our initial experiment, which cast the shadows onto the wall. This was just to test it out, but the image was too blurry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8iv6IM9Sp8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCy1BQEH380

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PIulCN2wdk

Instead we used the light on Tomaz's phone. So when we turned the lights off, we could move the light around the cutouts, whilst I filmed from the other side of the paper. We discovered some interesting effects we could create depending on the position of the light - we could distort the shadows to look taller/shorter/bigger/smaller by changing the angle and distance the light hit the cutouts. It was easy to use this to make it look like the people were moving through a crowd. In the end our chosen technique was to move the light so that it looks like you are walking through the crowd, then focus on the main character.

This was our finished first scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XB8Rgzazpw

I really liked this technique because of the way the light gradually moves down at the beginning, it creates an atmosphere. It was really easy to do but still really effective. The only difficulty we had was making sure the cutouts were positioned properly, because if they were too close together they blurred into one since it's all black. However we resolved this by reducing the number of buildings and people we used.