DIY animations can be a
fun alternative to a simple drawing session. A picture from a coffee table book
can serve as a landscape backdrop, toys can be props or friends, and the
fantasy characters drawn by a child suggest an imaginary story. Karkulaiset is a
mother-daughter collaboration during quarantine. The experience of being stuck
at home inspired them to produce a DIY animation. The underlying idea is that
while their bodies cannot leave the house, they can still inject life into
their drawn selves, run away for a walk, play with the snow and enjoy the
sun.
Here are their
instructions:
My daughter was well
aware that I make videos as an artist and assumed I know how to make
animations. She wanted to draw, so I suggested that we use cut-outs to make the
process faster. She could draw props and characters, cut them and move them in
the space to produce movement. While she was drawing I looked for a free stop
motion animation app on the smartphone, we used iMotion. The set where we
filmed the story was a simple table with two piles of books, on top of which
two sticks from both sides hold the smartphone horizontal with some duct
tape.
Then came the real team
work. My daughter was moving our characters and pressing the button to shoot. I
was advising her to keep the movements between each frame small enough and
reminding her which character had already been moved. Our paper cuts were very
flimsy which made them hard to operate, so I recommend fixing the drawings on
cardboard with glue, or draw on a thick paper.
In iMotion it’s possible
to edit out frames, so if there are hands in some frames it’s possible to cut
them out, but I didn’t find a way to make sound on the app. So we continued
working on the computer on an editing program (iMovie). We recorded sounds
ourselves with the smartphone, mimicking footsteps and other sounds. We also
used sound effects directly from iMovie. We added the title but didn’t do more
postproduction work, although there are many more possibilites of course!
