A Brief Introduction: The Cut-Out Animation can be defined as the technique of creating a cartoon or film in which the gesticulation of the artist is triggered by replacing its character’s bodily pieces just like (a head, a hand, a neck, a mouth, and so on).
Cut-out animation is a type of animation in which pre-punched shapes are altered frame by frame to create the illusion of movement. It creates the illusion that the character is moving. High-quality animation is required for the more mobile and difficult areas.
When animating a character, you must first divide the complete character into as many cut sections as are needed to animate it. Each body part is represented by a separate piece that may pivot around a pivot point.
This style of animation is referred to as inverse kinematics. A common 3D animation approach that allows multiple people to move in a logical and natural way. If I raise the character’s foot in 3D space, for example, his entire leg should rise with it.
The advancement in Cut-Out Animation!
Animation procedures have advanced in tandem with technological advancements. The cut-out animation approach has stayed essentially unchanged despite the growth and complexity of new technology and applications that have been introduced to the market. It is still commonly used to make animations for any site in today’s animation studios.
The puppets are drawn with animation software, which is the sole difference. The pivot points in a two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. The rotation of these pivot points is then determined by computers! Twining Animation is the term for this technique.
Some prominent Benefits
This production process is commonly used by animation studios nowadays because it saves time and money.
There’s no need to redraw each drawing frame by frame, as is the case with typical 2D animation. Each part of each character can only be drawn once.
However, we can use them as many times as we like for as much animation as possible after that. We can even recycle some of the animations we’ve already created.
This is a wonderful alternative for low-budget productions where you want to save a lot of time without sacrificing animation quality.
However, if you want more refinement, the forms substitution technique is still a viable alternative. This is a technique that uses the same principles as cut-out animation but allows you to change images within the same element. It allows you to add an additional layer of animation as well as more subtlety to your animation.
Especially when an element must spin around itself or when adding perspective to a forearm rotation. During a fast action phase, we may need to repaint the whole character by hand to provide the best fluidity of movement.
If you want to reduce time while still getting a nice output in 2D animation, the ideal way is to employ a hybrid animation technique. Cut-out animation (for the characters who don’t move much) and animation by substitution are used in a similar way.
Or even traditional animation for action scenes where everything is moving at a breakneck pace! Of course, the tools utilized to create this type of animation have evolved throughout time… However, the fundamentals stay the same!
Background of this technique (Cut-Out Animation)
Lotte Reiniger stands out as one of the first to use this animation technique in a traditional way (yes, it is still used in digital animation today – but I’ll get to that later).
This German director specializes in silhouette animation with cut-outs. She began filming a series of short films in 1919. Then she directed “Prince Achmed’s Adventures,” the first full film to use this approach (1926).
Yuri Norstein is a director from Russia. He directed the short film “Hedgehog in the Fog” (1975), which featured a variety of visual effects such as water and fog!
Some drawbacks
When you think about cut-out animation, it’s still a time-consuming procedure because each element must be separated and prioritized one by one.
Of course, there are limitations to this method. If you simply animate around the pivot points of the character and always from the same point of view, the character will remain stiff.
