TIL about shadow puppets from a kid at an art fair in Austin

I was at an outdoor art fair in Austin last spring, just walking through the digital art area. A kid maybe 12 years old had a tablet hooked up to a projector, making these shadow puppet animations. He told me he traced his hand shapes frame by frame in a free animation app. It took him 3 hours to make a 30 second clip of a bird flying. I thought it was the coolest thing, seeing how simple shapes can tell a story. Has anyone else tried animation with just basic hand drawn silhouettes?

2 comments

2 Comments

lindahunt12d ago

My buddy Dave actually did something similar for his daughter's birthday party last year. He spent a whole weekend tracing whatever shapes he could make with his hands, like a dog and a rabbit and some weird blob thing that was supposed to be a tree. The kid in that Austin story got me thinking about how much patience goes into it, because Dave was grumbling about how one bad frame could mess up the whole flow of the animation. He ended up with about 20 seconds of a bunny hopping across the screen, and his daughter watched it maybe fifty times before she got bored. It really is crazy how something so simple looking takes forever to make, like that 3 hours for 30 seconds sounds about right from what I saw.

kaib1812d ago

Wait, THREE HOURS for just 30 seconds of animation by a 12 year old kid? That's some serious dedication for a free app project. Makes me realize how much work goes into even the simplest looking animations.