Book that changed my life

Haha! I found it! God bless people stealing things and putting them on Youtube



I saw this a while back on C4's 'Animate TV' and dug out the notes I made at the time. This fits with what I'm looking at now in terms of pacing. Most of the slower paced British or American short films I'm coming across tend to have shots of about 4 secs when something's happening, setting a mood etc, with the odd shot being made even longer, usually to match a narrative.
This animation, however, doesn't actually have any shot changes at all. It was done in one long shot, taking out any changes of viewpoint, angle etc. It was made by Mr Aubtin making all the elements out of paper and sticking them to a wall - the flower field, the mountain, everything- so for every 'frame' of the animation he would cut out a new figure from paper, or move a previous cutout, and photographed it. By moving the camera up and down a little on each shot he could give the illusion of panning up and down, and also having the female character climb 'on the spot' and having rhe clouds move down faster.

Because this is all cutouts, and taken at at least 12/fps, if not more, it would be impossible for me to do within the time limit, and so also to achieve that single shot effect (at least the way he has) which is fine, I think in 30 secs I want to communicate more about the book than you could in one shot anyway. But it's a great effect, very sombre and slow to watch, and creates the illusion of more time than there actually is because the camera isnt shooting around angles every two seconds. When I'm storyboarding my animation I would love to try a pan shot in some form, maybe showing the prince travelling through space, past all the other planets.

Oh dear, that's probably going to mean using motion again. I could do with going to a tutorial on that. I last used it properly for the Part B big animation project, and I didn't really like it very much then either. Or alternatively, it might work just as well with Flash. I'm a lot more familiar with Flash now anyway, although it doesn't have the same range of filters and effects (which I probably wont need) or so useful a timeline for clips (which would be handy, since Flash works on a frame-by-frame basis. You can't just drag and drop sequences like you can in Motion.