Books and animation Tuesday, 15 September 2009

All you aficionados of both books and animation – take a look at This Is Where We Live, a short animated film celebrating Fourth Estate’s 25th anniversary.

TIWWL was produced by Asylum Films and shows a city made out of books, through which little paper people go about their business. Speaking to Imagine Magazine, animation director Jordon Wood describes the challenges of character animation:

“Each character was animated traditionally on paper which gave us the fluid movement we wanted. To get the authentic paper texture and print, each frame was then transferred by hand onto book pages. These were then cut out so they could be positioned on set.

“I then had to come up with a way of standing a single piece of flat paper on its end. Creating paper tabs for feet was the obvious choice but they couldn’t support the weight and were visible which ruined the illusion of a seamless character walking off the pages. There were often up to 40 characters in a shot; one frame could take 8 minutes to set up so we couldn’t have characters blowing over. We needed a sturdy, invisible rig and the simplest solution turned out to be the most effective. The individual character frames were rigged with a spine (paper clip) which kept the character flat; glue discoloured the paper so we used white tac instead. We moulded a tiny white tac foot at the base of the spine which supported the weight, kept the character in position and left no residue on the set when replaced with the next frame.”

If you’ve got time, watch the timelapse videos showing the animation and set-building teams at work as well as the film – it’s a fascinating process.

Production still (The Museum Quarter) from This Is Where We Live at www.25thestate.com.