One of Chile’s top television series Paper Port, which is currently finishing up production for its second season, is known for implementing a special animation technique they call “Papermotion.”
Created by Alvaro Ceppi, Hugo Covarrubias, Cristian Louit, Carlos Bleycher and Gabriel Noé, Paper Port is a mixed-media animated series that utilizes a combination of papercraft, stop-motion, and digital animation. The sets for the television series as well as the characters are all created out of paper and cardboard, giving their animation a unique paper texture.
Ceppi’s animation company Zumbastico Studios first came up with the Papermotion technique when animating for one of PapaNegro’s MTV music videos, which implements the style of “photo puppetry.”
In an exclusive interview with Cartoon Brew, Alvaro Ceppi, the CEO and creative director behind Paper Port, went into detail about the creative process behind the short-form 11-minute long show, describing how the stop-motion animation uses magnetic terminals to create the characters' bodies. He stated:
“We have different positions and designs for them. So at times we want to really reach something, we change the arm. And it’s very fast. Every part of the puppet is exchangeable magnetically.”
After the stop-motion process, the characters' facial expressions are then generated through 2d animation. Because Papermotion is their own original technique, Ceppi went on to explain how an inventive approach is vital for the series.
“That’s how we approach our things. We experiment, we build, we do. We have to. We are so far from everything that we have to develop our own things, trying to bring an original approach, not only in a technical way.”
Paper Port follows the adventures of a little girl who wakes up every day with a different and newly formed super-power. The television series will air in a few months on Señal Colombia in Colombia, Discovery Kids within Latin America, and in China.