What Is Cut
Cut-out animation is one of the oldest and simplest animation techniques and has many forms and variations. Essentially, cut-out animation involves producing animations using 2-D characters, props and scenes cut from materials, such as paper, card or fabric. Animators divide characters into smaller segments, piece together the individual cut-out shapes and move them in small steps, taking a picture -- with a film camera capable of taking single pictures -- at each step, to create the illusion of movement.
Animators typically have more difficulty controlling movement in cut-out animation than in full cel animation, in which characters and scenes are drawn or painted on transparent celluloid sheets, so they need to plan the action accordingly. Cut-out animation lends itself well to decisive, rapid movement or even frenzied, continuous action, which disguises some of the limitations of cut-out characters. Cut-out animation is also a highly personal experience; the animator essentially portrays a character, mood or idea just by moving cut-out shapes around, using only his judgment and experience to do so.
The principal advantage of cut-out animation, especially for a solo animator, is that it requires many fewer drawings than full cel animation. The animator can use a single drawing, cut into pieces, to represent movement that would otherwise require hundreds of cels. Animators can design the cut-out pieces themselves, so the range of subject matter is limited only by their imagination.
The 2-D shapes make smooth, fluid movement -- particularly movement toward or away from the camera -- difficult to achieve. Any detail applied to a cut-out shape limits the angle at which an animator can take a picture of it. Similarly, cut-out animation doesn't work well for facial close-ups, so dialogue that requires the lip movements of a character to be synchronized with recorded sound -- lip-sync -- is rare. Cut-out animation is typically used for mimed stories with duration of five minutes or less.
Modern animators often produce animation in the cut-out style using computers, by replacing physically cut-out shapes with digitized, scanned images. Cut-out animation is a popular technique because it saves production time and leads to smaller file sizes when compared to full cel animation. The Comedy Central animated series, "South Park," was originally made using physical paper cut-outs, but subsequently by computer animation, which retained the look and feel of the original episodes. In fact, the South Park animators use high-end hardware and software to create animation that looks cheap and amateurish deliberately.
Writer Bio
A full-time writer since 2006, David Dunning is a professional freelancer specializing in creative non-fiction. His work has appeared in "Golf Monthly," "Celtic Heritage," "Best of British" and numerous other magazines, as well as in the book "Defining Moments in History." Dunning has a Master of Science in computer science from the University of Kent.