The Melbourne-based studio yelldesign, founded by Matt Willis, specializes in stop-motion animation, which they typically share on Vine, Instagram and other social media. One of their projects, Papermeal, is an original series in which meals are made of paper and shot as stop-motion animations.Yelldesign’s latest Papermeal animation is a banana split. As with its previous installments, everything on screen is made of paper—apart from the hands that appear in shots.
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Willis tells The Creators Project that, over the the last 18 months, his team of animators, designers, assistants and a “studio hand” have significantly increased the amount and quality of papercrafted objects in their animations. Papermeal is a celebration of all of this work.“The key thing that we built the whole concept off was the idea that we had never seen a complete meal made from paper,” Willis says. “We’ve seen loads of paper-crafted food items in stills and ads, but never a full recipe built from scratch. The idea evolved and we decided to make everything out of paper—the sets, props and utensils, too. Then we added our quirky style and Papermeal was born.”
The team uses a mixture of handcrafted pieces and laser-cut elements. Willis says they have an in-house cutter so that the detail can get extreme.“Even with the cutter, the project still took nine of us three months to build,” he says. “We are always busy making videos for clients, brands and agencies, so we had to fit Papermeal in around that.“If you have a spare hour at the end of the day, go and make a banana,” Willis adds. “Eventually the props were ready, and each shoot was roughly 3-6 hours long. As this was an internal project, we have full creative license and can change the set or framing during the shoot. Its great to have that freedom, and spontaneous decision-making usually leads to more dynamic animations.”
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