This exercise requires a little photography, some X-Acto knife work, and a simple downshooter setup. It is not necessary to shoot these cutouts on a downshooter or a piece of glass, but that may add another element for the more advanced animator. You are going to photograph a person (yourself) and print out that photograph on thin card stock that you can run through a printer. You then cut the parts of your body in sections so they can be animated. You also need a few images from the web or magazines that have images of different heads, which you substitute for your own head in the animation.
Make sure that these head images are basically in the same scale as your body, although varying the scale a bit can add a lot of humor to this exercise.
Here is how it works. First, set up your dslr camera on a tripod with a wide lens, like a 35 mm or 24 mm focal length. Have the camera facing a blank wall with no detail on it. Frame it so you can stand in front of the camera (using the self-timer) and shoot a shot of yourself that includes your head down to your knees. Stretch your arms out away from your body, because they are cut out separately in the cutting phase.
FIG 5.A A shot of the camera setup of Exercise 5 for photographing the subject (yourself).
You can take several shots with different expressions on your face or even a four-increment head turn of yourself standing in the same position. You can add these additional head positions to the animation using the heads as replacements if you want to add a little more dynamic range to your animation exercise, but this is not necessary. Once you have your shot(s), download them onto a computer so you can print them out on thin card stock that you can use in your printer. You should size your images so they can be printed out on an 8V2 x 11 inch piece of paper or card stock.
Take those color printouts of your self-portrait shot and place them on a cutting surface, like a rubber cutting mat. Since you shot your image in front of a blank background, it should be very easy to see and cut out your contour.
It is best to use an X-Acto knife to cut your image from the background. You can use scissors but they need to be smaller and very sharp to get good clean edges. The next step is to cut apart the image of yourself in several areas. You want to separate the head from the shoulders. One way to make this cut is to separate the head from the torso at the neckline where your neck goes into the collar of your clothes. The arms should be separated at the shoulders and need to be cut at the elbows and wrist. Wherever you want to have movement is where you need to make the cut. Remember that, when you reassemble the parts, there must be a slight overlap of the sections so your new cutout portrait may be a little shorter than you are. If you print two copies of your portrait, you can cut the torso out of one copy leaving the shoulder areas a little longer. Then cut the arms from the second copy. This way you have a little overlap, at least from the shoulder to the upper arm.
FIG 5.B The setup for cutting, including a mat, knife, scissors, and the final cutout of your body.
The next step is where you can have some fun. You are going to animate your character, throwing off your head, and new heads appear. So, you need to find some different heads that you can photograph yourself, cut out of a magazine, or even find on the Internet and print out. The heads could come from Hollywood stars, politicians, your friends, drawings that you create, insects, or any variety of heads you choose. They can vary in scale as long as they have a believable visual fit to your original body.
Fig 5.c a series of heads that go on your cutout self-portrait.
If these images are printed on thin paper, they will require some backing. I recommend getting some spray glue and attaching these magazine heads to some of the thin card stock you used for printing your self-portrait. The image can be loosely cut out of a magazine and attached to the card. Once they are bonded then you can do the careful cutting with the X-Acto knife required to pull the head image from the background.
Now that you have all of your cutout elements, you are ready to set up the camera and shooting area. If you have a downshooter available or created a setup with a suspended piece of glass and a lower level background, then place a bright green (ideally a chroma key green) card on that lower level.
This way, when you shoot your animation, you can put in any background you desire later in postproduction. Please refer to Chapter 10 regarding this technique. I want to make sure that this exercise can be simply executed, so I continue as though you have no downshooter available. You can shoot these cutouts on a stable, simple, plain tabletop that allows the cutouts to stand out visually. You also need some beeswax, Blu-tack, or thin double-sided tape (this has the sticky material on both sides of the tape). I recommend using the sticky wax often found at miniature and craft stores for holding small objects on shelves. Use this wax to stabilize your cutout parts as you move them on the tabletop. Assemble your portrait of yourself together with the cutout parts on the tabletop. Then, take your dslr camera mounted on your tripod and raise the tripod pretty high up so you can tilt the head and camera down at the cutout on the table. It is ideal to have the angle of the camera perpendicular to the tabletop, but this is not always possible. One way to allow this to happen is if you can slightly tilt the table up toward the camera. Another technique that you can use is to shoot on a clean floor space with the tripod directly above the cutout shooting area. It is important to note that you probably have to change the focal length of the lens to something longer, like a 55 mm or even 85 mm. If you are shooting on the floor and using a zoom lens, then adjust the focal length so you do not see the legs of the tripod but only the cutout model with some room around it. It would be smart to adjust your iris to f-8 or smaller (i.e., f-16) to help maintain a good depth of field. You have to connect your camera to a computer that is running Dragon Stop Motion or a similar program. Having the frame comparison option to complete this exercise properly makes all the difference.
Fig 5.D An example of the tripod pointing down to a tabletop.
FIG 5.E The composition of the final cutout from the camera’s POV.
Now you are ready to shoot. You should always start with a hold. This can be ten frames. I recommend shooting this exercise at 15 fps. The idea is to start with your image, including all the cut sections with the arms down to the side. If you had replacement heads of yourself turning or making an expression this would be a good time to substitute those heads. Shoot one frame per head, turn, and hold the extreme head position for at least eight frames. Then, turn the head back to the camera. Raise the arms so they are placed as though they are holding the head. Remember your eases and increased increments to get to this position. Hold the arm parts in this head-holding position for eight frames then have a one-frame ease-in of the hands with the head between the hands, separating the head from the shoulders. Next, raise the arms and hands above the body as far as you can with the head starting to rise just above the hands and being jettisoned out of the upper frame.
FIG 5.F Several different positions in the animation.
Once your head is out of frame, bring the arms back down to the sides of the body, matching the opening position. You can refer to the opening frame and make an onionskin comparison with that frame and your final settled new position of the arms down to the sides of the body. Once the arms are settled, drop in one of your magazine heads from the upper frame. Have it drop pretty fast (about three to five frames) and settle on your headless body. It would be fun to drop your body down about an inch, ease out and then raise the body back up to its beginning default position. The end of the arms (hands) should stay in the same position but keep the shoulder attachment connected to the body so the arms slightly drop down with the body at the shoulders when the body sinks. This gives the new head a bit of weight when it hits the torso. Once the new head is on, hold for 20 to 30 frames, so we see what the new head is, then raise the arms again to jettison the new head, the same way you did with your original head.
You can carry on this way with as many heads as you like. The final head should be your own head dropping into frame once again. Settle out this final position and compare the body, arms, and head with the original first frame to make it as close in position as possible. This way you can loop your dropping head exercise.
