This is one
of my favourite styles of animation. Silhouette animation is essentially
shadow puppetry for the film age. The pioneer of this technique was Lotte
Reiniger and she produced dozens of films from the 1920s right up
until her death in 1981. I introduced my own children to her work through
her fairy tales, the majority of which are now available on the DVD collection,
Fairy
Tales. Many of her films have also been posted onto Youtube; for example
here is Hansel
and Gretel from 1955.
Getting
started
Lotte Reiniger
wrote a book Shadow
Theatres and Shadow Films which you can sometimes pick up second hand.
It is an interesting book with some details on Lotte's film techniques.
There were also two documentaries made about her film making. One of them
"The Art of Lotte Reiniger" shows details of her puppet constructions
and is really worth watching before you start. I believe it is included
on the Fairy Tales DVD. The documentary is also available online here.
Shadow films
are a special case of 2-d animation and you will need to first mount your
camera horizontally. See the earlier section on 2-d animation for some
techniques. The filming stage is a light box. We use a cheap lightbox
designed for craft activities approximately A4 in size. The shadow puppets
are constructed from black card (other dark colours will also work). Backgrounds
are either constructed out of tracing paper or simply printed onto thin
white paper (in grayscale). Here is an example of a silhouette film made
with the digiblue:
This
was our first shadow film made with a Digital Blue Camera (version
1). It was a joint effort between myself and my 8 year old daughter.
The
backgrounds were coloured after filming using the Movie Creator
software.
The
title page and end page were drawn in RM's Colour Magic software
with the aid of the symmetry tool.
The Lightbox
I bought
this lightbox for about £50.
It
is really easy to transport and setup which is great if you are
using it a school club. It works on mains power only. It does not
get hot and so is perfectly safe to use with young children. This
model of lightbox is available direct from LightboxUK.
Setting it up just requires plugging it in and positioning it below
the mounted camera. If you are using it at a club, then there is
no need to turn off the overhead lights in order to work with this
box; other children in the club can work as normal.
The Shadow
Puppets
If
you would like to make your own puppets then you will need dark
coloured card. Black is best but you will need a white pencil. Thin
card is fine. It is not essential that the children create elaborate
jointed puppets (as can be seen in the film above). The important
thing is to create a character that will look good as a silhouette.
Children's stencils are good for this.
You
can also use stencil images from the internet printed directly onto
dark card. This free
stencil site is very good, but don't print the black versions
off otherwise you will exhaust your ink supply in no time at all!
Ready
Made Characters
As
for 2-d animation, there are ready sources of character material
available from craft suppliers. Search on ebay for "die cuts"
for cardmaking. These are brilliant for one off animations for halloween
for example.
Ebay
sellers of this kind of craft material will often cut pieces to
order so that you can specify black / dark card.
The Backgrounds
Lotte
Reiniger's backgrounds were constructed using intricate layers of
transparent paper. Although striking, this technique would be rather
ambitious for children. I have found that printing simple grayscale
pictures onto thin white paper works quite well, as does drawing
in pencil onto tracing paper. Or a combination of the two. For example,
this churchyard scene was printed onto white paper.
The
sky was cut out and discarded. The rest was stuck onto an A4 sheet
of tracing paper. A circular hole was cut in the tracing paper so
that the 'moon' was the brightest part of the background. Gravestones
were drawn in pencil. Foreground gravestones and grass were then cut
out of black card and stuck on. Backgrounds like these can be stored
easily in plastic sleeves.
