Papercuts, the successor to Arbitrary Stopframe, originated from some sketchy ideas which occurred to me while I was filming the Darlan short Smells Interesting in December 2011. In my earliest concepts, the show would have been much more similar to its stopmotion predecessor, with the characters living inside a dictionary and periodically venturing out to raid my desk for resources; I thought they would usually try to avoid me, but I even toyed with the idea of having them attack me directly in the occasional episode. However, I decided this was going to be too complex, and too similar to other shows (Morph, for example), so I revised the plan and settled on a more self-contained narrative form. The title stuck, despite the fact that the characters no longer exist as pieces of paper from a narrative perspective but only in terms of how the animation is produced.
I wrote three episode scripts in January 2012, followed by a fourth co-written with Tim Johnston in February, and it then took me four months to complete the first pair of episodes. I started dialogue recording for Episodes 3 and 4 a few hours after completing Episode 1, and the fourth instalment remained in production until December.
Three more episodes, including a two-part story by Tim, were scripted over the summer of 2013, and produced in the second half of the year, with the last one being released on the 28th of December. The production block also included a one-scene prologue to Episode 5, and a multi-part production vlog following the development of a new set for the two-parter.
The show has now been on hiatus for a few years, but as of autumn 2021 there are a handful of potential new stories in development.
