In a continuation of our desire to recognize and highlight excellence in student work, our next Showcase pick comes from Maja Korn, a student of Timebased Media at Hochschule Mainz University of Applied Sciences. Korn’s cut-out paper project was an assignment in a stop motion animation course by Franziska von Holst. “We learned and tried out new techniques every week,” the animator told us. “So this project was me trying out cut out/paper animation for the first time.”

The kinetic result is certainly impressive for a first attempt.

“I wanted to work with layers and I thought it would be cool to have some sort of inverted look, that is why instead of having a paper dot move around I cut a hole into the paper for each frame. Hence I had to prepare every single frame beforehand. I made a layout for the shapes and movements in After Effects, then I assembled the frames and shot them using Dragonframe.

“As it was my first time doing paper animation, I couldn’t really imagine what the outcome would exactly look like but this was really exciting. Doing it again, I would plan more time for the preparation of frames and I would make them bigger. I had 10 frames on one sheet of paper and it was the smallest my camera could capture, also flaws are much more noticeable with such a small size, they become huge.”

While this is true, some might say flaws like an imperfectly cut piece of paper make a piece more visually interesting and, of course, more obviously done by hand in a sea of done by computer work. So we are fans for sure.

We asked Korn what’s up next for her: “At the moment I am working on the last stop motion project for this semester and then I will start to focus on my bachelor thesis, which will probably be an animation project about Long Covid.”

Good luck, Maja, we look forward to seeing more!