How is Chinese paper-cut animation made?

Here is a brief introduction to the shooting process of paper-cut animation.

The first step: the creative staff of the crew will collect folk songs, and after they come back, they will collectively study the modeling design and make creative preparations according to the collected materials.

Step 2: The producer draws and makes patterns according to the film theme, the director's intention and the artistic modeling design. The art design of newspaper clippings is generally divided into modeling design and background design, which are as important as the story of the film. Its workflow is the same as animation. First, the art designer determines the overall artistic style of the film according to the intention of the director, producer and script.

Step 3: Cut the colored paper into figures, costumes, backgrounds and props with a knife instead of a pen.

To make a figure or background that can be photographed, it is necessary to disassemble the joints of the limbs of the figure according to the sketch of modeling design. For example, a character's arm can be divided into upper arm, forearm, palm and even fingers, and then cut, carved and drawn with paper specially dyed for each part of the character. It should be noted that these disconnections must understand the intention of modeling design, meet the requirements of performance, and cannot weaken the overall artistic style, let alone hinder the action performance of the characters.

Step 4: After putting joints on the paper man and painting clothes, the paper man with flexible hands and feet becomes an "actor" in the paper-cut film. Before the "actor" performs, the action designer must be familiar with the plot, master the law of animation movement, understand the specific environment of each shot, master the character and the modeling characteristics of the paper doll in the play, and prepare and rehearse the desk in advance to ensure that the actions performed by the characters are more accurate and vivid when shooting.

Step 5: Color the cut background according to the content requirements of the film, so as to create the environmental atmosphere of the film. Background design is mainly to draw the color atmosphere draft of the main scene according to the environment of the story and the space requirements of the characters' activities. At the same time, it is necessary to determine the framing of the picture in each shot and make accurate provisions on the level of the scene and props.

Step 6: Set the characters and backgrounds according to the requirements of the film content, and stick them on the glass or celluloid board for shooting as pictures and images on the screen in the future. When placing paper pairs one by one, there are special requirements for the glue used for pasting because it needs to be pasted on the glass plate many times.

1, this glue won't dry for a long time;

2, when pasting, it must have a certain strength and cannot be easily removed;

3. When taking off, you can't leave traces on the glass plate, nor can you damage the paper couple;

After years of trial production and exploration, the creator of paper-cutting found that the colloid on a medical adhesive tape could meet the above requirements, so he scraped it off and named it "Scraping Adhesive".

The seventh part: The action designer holds a stopwatch on his desk and works out the action design according to the requirements of film screening speed. The future "actors" of scissors and cloth will perform according to these designs.

Step 8: When shooting officially, the photographer and the action operator work closely together. Every time one or two frames are shot, the operator has to adjust and move the paper figure once, which is what we often call "shooting one frame at a time".

Step 9: After the shooting is completed, the film frames are spliced together for continuous projection, and finally the film is made and shot.