Stop-motion short Tape Monkey I did in an animation minor in Aalto University. The whole short is below.
We had a week to film a stop-motion short in the beginning of the animation minor. What I love about stop-motion is how you build the characters as well as the background and move them with your hands. Whenever I watched a stop-motion film with puppets I’ve had the desire to build my own characters and animate them. For the minor however, I decided to try cutout animation since we didn’t have much time. I did enjoy making the characters from paper too and stop-motion was overall an exciting experience. We filmed the shorts with Dragonframe which I really liked since it was easy to use.
The story for the short evolved from a thought that it would be fun to try animating tape alongside cutout animation. That led into creating a monkey that conjures tape and lives in a world where the animals are aware that they are made of paper. It was interesting to study monkey’s and heron’s anatomy in order to decide how many paper pieces the characters needed to be assembled from.
For the short’s music I was inspired by the classic Tom and Jerry shorts where laughs, cries and other voices were conveyed through the orchestra's music. I decided to use only violin music and searched for suitable tracks from freesound.org.