Papercut animation workshops for kids

As part of the continuum: Independent animation from Japan and Australia exhibition and event series, The Japan Foundation, Sydney presents a papercut animation workshop for kids.

Participants will have the chance to create their own animal puppets and to learn and explore the process of papercut animation through manipulating the puppet under camera. The outcome of the workshop will be a fun, short video featuring each participant’s puppet animation!

This workshop is suitable for children ages 8-14.

Papercut or cut-out animation is one of the oldest and simplest animation techniques. It involves producing animations using 2D flat characters, props and scenes cut from materials such as paper, card and fabric. Animators separate characters into smaller segments, piece together the individual cut-out shapes and move them in small steps, taking a single picture at each step to create the illusion of movement. The world's earliest known animated feature films were made using this technique by animators such as Quirino Cristiani and Lotte Reiniger. Throughout the years, papercut animation has featured on both the big and the small screen, in music videos and even in video games. A more recent work that used papercut stop-motion animation for its pilot episode is the well-known series South Park.