Strata cut is a very unique animation technique that consists of making a long sculpture of modeling clay and making frames from slices of it. Since this is a fairly unknown method of animation, I decided to make these simple tutorials to help spread the knowledge. Please keep in mind that I am still learning and am absolutely no “pro” at it, so these will very much be a record of my process and what worked (or didn’t work) for me.

• Scaling shapes

    Imagine a loaf of bread where each slice is an animation frame (I believe that’s the closest analogy we can get). Now, in order to make things move, we need to think of frames as a single object that has a different shape along its length. For example, a cube won’t have any animation when sliced - it will be a static square. A square pyramid, however, will become an animation of a square becoming bigger (or smaller) as we slice it.


     The same can be applied to a cone, a triangular pyramid, a hexagonal pyramid and so on, but in each case the figure growing or shrinking will be different (a circle, a triangle and a hexagon respectively).


    We can apply this principle to any figure we want to make shrink or grow on screen. Of course, as they become more complex, the complexity of the shape also intensifies.


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