I used to cut paper in high school for my portfolio, so I wanted to return to that and simply show the process. People who looked at what I've made consumed with their eyes in just a couple seconds what took my hands and x-acto knife a few hours to quite carefully make. So this project (the storyboard in addition to both the original and condensed videos) offers a glimpse into those hours, in the quiet hope that others might one day look at an object and linger to wonder how it came to be.
‘Keep calm and carry on’ is a phrase from the wonderfully iconic posters the British government commissioned during World War II as a sort of encouragement in case the Nazis ever managed to invade Britain. I've used it in previous projects and developed a bit of a personal attachment to it. I used the horizontal line to keep the letters together, but it also serves as the border between sky and sea, the surface of water on which the jellyfish is floating. The original posters had a crown to go with the phrase and were vertically oriented, but I think jellyfish and a horizontal layout embody the phrase well.
Regarding games, stop motion is a playful medium. In cutting paper, I play with positive and negative space; in showing the process, I am kind of playing hide-and-go-seek with what eventually emerges from the paper.
If I did this all over again, I’d have better lighting and try to find a way to make things more consistent - I shot all 314 frames by hand on the floor of my room without any kind of a setup, so the camera angle shifts a bit from picture to picture.
I’m overall content, though. It’s kind of nice to sit back and appreciate the process of creation.
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