Silhouette Animation

Silhouette Animation

Silhouette animation is a very simple and effective type of stop motion animation. Silhouette animation is when characters are only visible as black silhouettes; this is usually created by clever backlighting and cardboard cut outs.

Here is an example of a still image taken from a silhouette animated film. The characters don't have an ernormous amount of detail as their facial and body features are not shown, just the outline of the characters are shown.

Silhouette animation can also be a very time consuming as a lot of silhouette animation is hand drawn, each drawing is only changed slightly, then a picture is taken of each drawing and they are put together. On average an hours worth of drawing would only be about 3-4 seconds of footage.

The earliest film made using silhouette animation was 'The sporting mice' which was made 1909 by a british filmmaker Charles Armstrong. The film was about a group of mice.

Here is an example of a short story made by using silhouette animation:

From looking at this particular animation you can see that the characters and teh backgrounds were hand drawn and then the animals were separate drawings and were moved around slightly, with a lot of still images being taken. You can see that detail within the outline of the characters isn't key because they are not shown, whereas the outline is the key to making a great and detailed silhouette animation.