Pancake Day in Lockdown — Short

We always thought that pancakes look a bit like the moon, so we created a stop motion animation using 600 pancakes to tell a short story of a pancake character going on a journey to get there.

We follow our pancake protagonist on a short adventure, travelling through land, sea & air and then launched the film on Pancake Day.

We started by creating the animation in Cinema 4d in a frying pan shaped sequence.

Working with this circular aspect ratio, we could then project the individual frames onto hot plates, giving us a clear outline to be traced in pancake mixture and cooked.

It took us around 3 days to bake the 600 pancakes required for the 30 seconds of animation at 20 pps (pancakes per second). After frying we carefully labelled each pancake and organised them into sequences, working quickly to film and re-fry all the pancakes while they were still fresh.

We were invited onto the Vimeo blog to give a short featured tutorial on stop motion animation. We also teamed up with The Saturday Club to run a ‘pancake animation’ workshop, teaching the principles of animation to underprivileged teenagers.