Cut out animation is a good way to learn some key concepts in stop motion animation, indeed animation generally. This tutorial looks at the classic "bouncing ball", providing some new ideas on an old formula.
This animation is made using cut out colored cardboard, filmed with Stop Motion Pro. This tutorial will introduce you to concepts such as squash and stretch and delayed action.
To film cut out animation easily, it is good to mount your camera directly above the table top. You could use a copy stand, a tripod or make a wooden frame with a tripod sized screw thread. Some lights set at 45 degrees help elimiate shadows from the animator. We used just one light for this animation.
If your camera is mounted like the image above, it would appear upside down on the screen. To recitfy this Stop Motion Pro has the ability to horizontally and vertically flip the image. You do this from the Settings > Capture settings menu.
Draw 3 seperate pictures for the bouncing ball, a normal round ball shape, and two distorted ones, used when the ball bounces on the flat ground. The squashed shapes help give the ball weight, and the "bounce" we are looking for.
Cut out the ball shapes. Next, draw up a guide showing where the ball is going to be for each captured frame. You are going to use this guide to position the ball in the right place. At the bottom of this webpage there is a description of using markers for this same function.
You can see here how the guide is used to line up the ball position. The tighter graduations at the top of the guide slow the ball down, as it reaches the top. Then gravity takes over and the ball drops down, follow the same graduations, getting faster. The squashed shapes are not marked on the guide, simply put them on the ground. Use the onionskinning tool to line things up. Do this by having live video showing, then sliding the onionskinning slider to the right on the toolbar. This will let you see what is on the previous frames.
Once you are happy with your bouncing ball, you can experiment with delayed action. We have drawn a face on our ball and cut out some arms. To give the arms weight the hands move one or two frames behind the body, meaning they are slightly delayed. This makes them trail slightly, giving them the illusion of weight. Watch the video below:
You can see how this delayed follow action is used for clothing, hair, and other effects. It is one of the key pricipals of animation. Try putting a hat on your ball and delaying the effect of gravity on it. Experiment and have fun, cut out animation really lends itself to trying different timings.
Next steps:
You can also setup your bouncing ball movements with markers. You can position indicators on screen of where the ball should be at different frames. This means you can place objects at precise intervals, and repeat them easily. Markers do not appear in the final animation, they are just a guide while filming. Firstly turn markers on from the View menu.
Now move your mouse over the image, right click, you will see the menu to the left appear. You can see the various options for markers, there are different sorts depending on your needs. In this case we are going to select add point.
Then simply left click your mouse where you want the markers positioned. To move or delete markers right click over the image and explore the markers menu that appears.
In the case of a bouncing ball, you may like to make it loop over and over again, as we did in the video clip. Click on the Editor button on the main toolbar in Stop Motion Pro. From here you can see your images as thumbnails. You can select mulitple frames by shift or ctrl clicking on them. Use the different options on the right hand side to repeat, hide, copy, paste, reverse and other functions. Make up a test project and explore the editing fuctions.
