On Monday, i started my first university task; Paper animation, a traditional method of animation that was used a lot for early animation films, such as Disney’s first few films and cartoons. I was excited to start this task, as i like the aesthetic of hand drawn paper animations, and I’ve always wanted to try this method of animation out but i never knew where to start.

I was introduced to a piece of equipment that i had little knowledge of before; a light-box. a light-box is used to that you can layer the animation frames, and it acts as a kind of onion skin so that you can keep consistency between frames. The light-box was relatively easy to use, and it was a great help to me.

There are two methods of creating paper animation; pose to pose, or straight ahead. The first method i tried was straight ahead; this was where you draw straight on to the paper without any planning. I found this task challenging as i didn’t have a clear idea of what my end result was; i constantly had to challenge my imagination to come up with something coherent. I started with a circle, and i focused on trying to change it’s shape; i eventually turned it in to a shape that looked like the outline of a small slime creature to me, so i decided to turn it into a cute slime monster. I line tested it by using stop motion now, ensuring that i took each picture twice (as we animated in twos) and kept the frame rate at 25fps. I was happy with the result of this animation, as i feel it had some of my own personality and character in it.

The second method of paper animation i tired out was pose to pose animation. This method was a little bit easier, as there was a predetermined order of events in place; we had to draw a character’s facial expression changing between three emotions, with a neutral expression being the first one. I decided to go from normal to afraid to happy, as i thought this would be a fun challenge due to how different the expressions look from each other. I came up with a quick design that wouldn’t be too hard to re-draw; a cute alien man.

There was a technique to creating this animation; we started with the first frame, then we drew the middle frame, the transitional frames and then finally the last frame. We used the pre-drawn frames as reference for the frames that we would draw in between. We had to have the earliest and latest frames on the light box while drawing the frames between them (foe example when drawing frame 9 i had frames 1 and 17 on the light box). This confused me at first, but i was quickly pointed in the right direction and carry on the task with ease.

I’m happy with how this animation came out because it looks a lot smoother than most of the animations i did prior to it, mostly because of the increased amount of drawings i produced. I also learned about using key frames, which i didn’t really understand prior to doing this animation. I think this is a method of animation that can be applied to other types of animating (e,g 2d digital), and i’ll be sure to keep on using it.

The last animation i did was a combination of both techniques. On top of my pose to pose animation, i created a straight ahead animation that would interact with my alien and be the reason of his emotional changes. I started with a circle like i did previously, and i ended up developing it into a creature similar to the one in my first straight ahead animation. This was the easiest of the 3 animations, as i already had an idea of what i was doing and what was going to happen.

Lastly i created a second pose to pose animation, since i had extra time. I did this because i made a lot of mistakes in my first animation, and i wanted to do another one to ensure that i understood the process well. i worked in the same way i did to create my first pose to pose animation, and again i went with a simplistic idea as i wanted to pay more attention to the process than the drawing. I worked a lot faster this time around, and i made significantly less mistakes. All in all i’m happy with how this turned out, and i feel that i fully understand pose to pose animation after creating these.

All in all i feel that this was a good introduction to paper animation; it was challenging but not too complex. i learned some small things that i can carry over to other ways of animation, and i had fun while completing each of the tasks. i hope to be able to properly render them next time, as i had to use stop motion now because i wasn’t on site, so i still don’t know how to render paper animations in the right way. I’m excited to play around more with this style of animation, and i’m curious to see what kinds of things i can come up with.