Paper Cut-Out Animation

This weekend I was watching an episode of South Park (which I never actually watched until college and begrudgingly admit that I enjoy) and instantly knew that I wanted to blog about it. In A Very Crappy Christmas, Butters creates paper cut outs of Kyle, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny so the boys can create their own movie to spread the spirit of Christmas to all of South Park. While they're working on the animation, we see the boys looking for each specific shaped mouths ("E" mouth, "woo" mouth, etc;) for their cut out selves to sing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." In 3 hours, the boys have made it to "We wish you a merry" which I thought was funny looking at how much time it usually takes to put into a project, considering all the pre production, production, and post.

Personally, I've never worked with paper cut-outs for a project, so I wanted to see what the process was really like. I found a tutorial on stop motion using paper cut-outs and wanted to share that with all of you.

The estimated time for this piece of animation is an hour and a half (including the time it takes to shoot your actor running in front of the green screen). To me, that didn't seem like much time for an effect I wouldn't have known how to begin without the tutorial.

The creators of South Park started the same way as their characters did. Creating a pilot (that was never aired), Matt Stone and Trey Parker spent about 70 days on the 22 minute episode. Today, the episodes are created utilizing computer technology such as Maya.