Paper Cutting

I started working on the paper cutting for the stomach sequence of my film. To be honest I was a bit worried how long this part would take me, but I was surprised at how quickly I managed to hand cut everything. In fact I feel like the longest part of the process was the preparation: setting up the frames to be printed correctly and the actual printing was a bit of nightmare (thank you for the USB lend Steve!), but I got there in the end. 

My highly technical light box

some frames ready to be cut

A finished cut frame

offcuts that I  drowned my room in


There were fifty frames of Henry swimming in total, and I was super excited to shoot them. I was lucky to get to use the E101 space, which was massive and empty and gave me lots of scope to play around with lighting. After having spent so long on my cintiq animating the rest of the film it was so nice to be able to hand animate and craft something physical again. I think I need a constant balance between the two, as I really miss one when I concentrate on the other.

What I was surprised by was how long it took me to put the scene together- cutting the frames and shooting seemed to go a lot faster than the actual comping did. Thank god for the fantastic Queen of AE extraordinaire Inês Delicioso who soothingly helped me through the process and every now and then pressed like 4 buttons and did in a minute what would have taken me an hour. The one thing this process has thought me is that I really want to spend more time with After Effects, but for now I am super happy with how the paper scene is looking.

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