By Grace Burns
Cutouts, cutouts, cutouts. I spent most of the process of working on Made of Many Parts with a pair of scissors in my hand, cutting out frames of drawings that I had scribbled out over a lightbox with the paper provided in the lab. In order to keep things visually interesting in a film of mostly still shots, I drew each still drawing three times and had them swap every two frames in order to keep a sketchy, notebook drawing-type look to the art style.
In order to keep everything stable in each shot, I utilized a makeshift layering system on the animation table. I had two panes of glass to work with, and I separated them with manga volumes from my bookshelf at home. In a way, my inspirations were literally physically supporting me through this endeavor, and I find that heartwarming.
Of course, a lot was going on behind the scenes as well. In my favorite shot from the film, the TV shot, there was a very roundabout process involved. To start, I had to render out each individual clip I was going to use in Adobe Premiere, isolating each individual frame as a PNG file. From there, I combined every frame of each clip together into PDF files and printed out every single one onto pieces of paper. It came out to hundreds of sheets. It was quite a large stack of paper, and part of me felt silly going through this much effort for something people may or may not even notice. The most important part to me was making sure the entire animation process was made with zero digital edits involved (Aside from compiling everything together in an editing software, of course), and to achieve this, I shot every single frame of each TV/movie clip that I had printed out and edited them into a cute little compilation to highlight the media that inspires me. After all, that’s what the film is about!
Another standout point of the short that I loved working with was the backgrounds. For the sake of saving time, I wanted the film to take place in a sort of blank, empty, void-type environment, but I also wanted it to be visually interesting. To do this, I edited together six different images of paint splatters in Photoshop and put a lot of different adjustment layers and filters over them in order to make sure they were all highly saturated and brightly colored. I was worried it might be a bit overstimulating for viewers (I’m sure it is for a lot of people), but it ended up working in my favor due to the messy, splattered backgrounds contrasting very well with the clean, white paper I used for the actual cutout drawings.
All in all, I really enjoyed working traditionally with this kind of animation style. It was the type of hands-on approach I desperately needed to preserve my interest in the medium, and I would highly recommend any animator, 2D or 3D, give it a shot just to really dig into the bare elements of animation.
Grace’s film was completely created in the experimenta.l. lab, in Fall 2022. It just got accepted into the Les Femmes Underground Film Festival in Los Angeles.
