Time to show some progress for that circus animation, isn’t it? I should be ashamed, I’m working on it for months now and still haven’t showed anything! Thing is, preparing all the characters, props and backgrounds for a paper cut animation takes the most time, while it only starts coming to life in the end when you finally can start animating.

Anyway, without giving away the whole story of this 30-second animation, these are the characters, a knife thrower and his lovely assistant:

And after scanning, printing on the right paper, protecting it with fixative and carefully cutting it…

…the fun task of making the edges of the paper black begins. This is to make sure the edges don’t reflect on the plastic sheets between the characters and the background, as this reflection would be visible in the animation.

You can imagine this is task that requires full concentration, as almost anything involving paper puppets, haha! Drawback of this black line is that it bleeds into the front side a little, so all the parts have this black line around them now. 

And this is where this black line becomes a problem: on the arms for example, when the parts overlap more during movement, this black line becomes visible. Oh well, nothing to be done about it!