Cat Animation Loop

Christina Dacanay and I worked on a 30-second stop-motion animation loop. In it, someone read a book and a cat sits lazily by the fire. A mouse squeaks and the cat gives chase. Some kind of commotion happens off-screen, and then the cat returns to lazing.

We cut shapes out of different colored and textured paper plus one old shirt and set up Dragonframe and a camera after a lot of switching out batteries and chargers etc. Our shoot took about four hours straight through and after some tweaking with a few added and subtracted frames I think we ended up with a pretty good little loop.

I added some sounds after recording—clipped, mixed, and synced to the timings on screen. These were: a cat meowing, general cat fight noises, some cardboard crashes, falling boxes, a squeaking mouse, not one but two fireplace sounds, a cat purring, and two page turn sound effects.