“I’m at this point in my director/animator career where I have animated a lot of fun and action stuff and I want to experiment with more aesthetic and graphic animations,” Victor Haegelin started out by telling us. That much is clear. He captions his exploration of newspaper, shadow, and dance, Paper Dance, as, “Paper dancing on Vivaldi’s Winter 1st move.”

“The aim here,” he goes on, “was to create a choreography by animating raw material….I used a regular stop motion socket and ball armature  on which I literally glued pieces of newspaper. I wanted the material on the puppet to be ‘alive’ so I allowed myself to replace paper parts on the puppet from one frame to another without taking care of the continuity.

“We particularly see it in the ‘frozen’ moment,” he says of the pause in which the paper-clad figure leaps into the air and seems to freeze in place, remaining suspended for a beat or two. The music, of course, obliges.

“One big challenge was to follow the rhythm,” he added, “so I noted keyframes to be sure to match the music. Another challenge was to make a perfect loop within a given timing, because the music loop was already edited before the start.

“And then one of the biggest challenges was to replace the lights in the middle of the animation because I needed to use them on another shoot, hoping I marked their position and I could do it without problem!”

For more on this production, see the behind the scenes video here: