Paper Cut Out Western

[antiflag8789]

Hello, Im currently a junior at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, majoring in animation. This is one of my final projects for my sophmore year, please tell me what you think, and how i can improve myself for the future. If you like this, please visit my youtube here (http://www.youtube.com/user/concertafilms)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcKu8t0u6ME

[Temple Fugate]

Welcome to the Drawing Board!

The animation is pretty nice. It's an effective short, demonstrating your grasp on the medium. There are a few places where you used the cutouts in interesting ways, such as the castle explosion and the disintegration of one of the shooters.

Personally, I would have liked to see more variety in the shots as the short progressed. The gunfight seemed to just end in the same place it started--the middle of the desert--though it did go through a castle at one point. On a technical level, the animation works very well. The details I noticed and gravitated toward were the aforementioned explosion, the faces on the sun, and the shooter with a beach ball for legs.

I'm not sure whether this piece falls into the "experimenting with the medium" territory or "telling a story about gunfighters" territory. Depending on your intentions as an artist/storyteller, my advice would be to try out some of the following:

- Play more with the perspective for some shots. The paper cutouts may be flat, but you can turn that space into a very deep 3-D perspective. You did it somewhat with the castle appearing to be in the distance, but it could be brought out even more by using super-close foreground elements and super-far background elements, with heavily distorted perspective.

- There are surreal elements in the short that you could actually expand upon. For the most part, the setting was something very familiar; gunfighters in the Old West. But if you want to go further with your experimental technique, go totally crazy. Instead of being peppered throughout the piece in little places (beach ball, castle, sun's faces) you could make the bizarre elements the focus and turn the entire animation into an abstraction. (If you aren't already familiar with them, I recommend checking out the works of the animation group PES (http://www.eatpes.com/).)

- Finally, there isn't much of a story to this animation. It may not have been your intention to focus on story (experimental animations rarely bother) but if your focus in the future is on storytelling, you should become more familiar with standard narrative structure. The gunfight is rather evenly-paced and could have included some more tension, unique personalities for each character, dynamic shots, etc. The constant music also contributed to the steady pace.

Hope I don't sound hyper-critical. I enjoyed your animation overall and am just trying to offer an honest critique.

[antiflag8789]

Hey man, sorry i didnt see this earlier, thanks a lot for the comments. i really appreciate it and will take it all in.