Skateboarding London's iconic cityscape has been put to paper in the animated film Paper Cut London, bringing both color and a laid-back soundtrack to the slew of tricks that are presented on 8mm. The three-and-a-half-minute short is a project that filmmaker and animator Phil Evans had been wanting to do for a long time. A skater himself, Evans says he "lives vicariously through people who are better" than him.
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We're glad he does, because the result of his experimentation with various frame rates and paper stocks is a smooth transition somewhere between illustration and live action.
Using too low of a frame rate would mean losing the details of the skateboarder's tricks. Image: Phil Evans
Evans released the film on Vimeo last month, but getting the project to that point, he says, wasn't easy. "I used to try to draw on Super 8 films," he tells Creators. "But it's super tiny. It's 8mm so you can barely see the frame with a magnifying glass. I would just do weird blotchy colors and couldn't really manipulate to the level that I wanted to."Eventually Evans figured it out, beginning by storyboarding and working initially with the material as if it was a straight video edit so that he could see where animation would be needed. "Then I export each clip at a different frame rate," he says. " Because it's skating you can't lose too much detail. So I color correct and print it out, planning how I'll manipulate it, whether that's cutting it or holding it.
Cutting the page. Image: Josh Ng
After, Evans draws on his printouts, scanning them once completed, which allows the folds of the paper to be seen in the film.
Some scenes involving a line of tricks would take Evans over a week to animate. Image: Josh Ng
He now hopes to develop Paper Cut London further."It's been really nice that Vimeo has supported Paper Cut London so well," he says. "I hope that I can get a budget to do a sequel. We've already been storyboarding and have tons of ideas. I can kind of see how the whole film is going to look."
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