A making-of retrospective details how Virgil Widrich folded 65,000 printed frames into Fast Film's paper sets

Animation World Network's 'Tearing up the Tracks: Virgil Widrich's Fast Film' documents the making of Widrich's 2003 short, built from more than 65,000 individual paper printouts of frames digitised from over 400 classic live-action films -- Psycho, North by Northwest, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Bond series among them. Widrich's small Vienna crew spent roughly two and a half years on the film, close to a year of that folding printed frames into three-dimensional paper objects by hand: a still of John Wayne as a fighter pilot folded into a paper aeroplane, printed frames folded into train carriages for a crash sequence built from around thirty separate paper-object layers. Each folded construction was photographed as a still on a Canon EOS D30 digital camera, tracked through an extensive shot database Widrich kept of titles, keywords and image descriptions, then sequenced and composited in Adobe After Effects into a single flowing camera move through paper architecture.

For the database, the durable fact is the technique itself -- three-dimensional paper construction, photographed and composited rather than incrementally re-posed, sitting on the boundary between papercraft and cutout animation. Folded into the Wiki as papercraft-animation, a new concept page distinguishing built three-dimensional paper work (Fast Film; Jamie Caliri's commercial and title-sequence papercraft) from flat, under-camera cutout animation such as Yuri Norstein's layered work.