In animation, we have spent the majority of our time working on the mood scenes. This has included: building, glueing and painting the background for our set; building, painting, and taking pictures of our puppets; and animating digital versions of our puppets. The “real” and “digital” versions of our puppets only did stop-frame animations of them walking across the screen, but we have been working on this since October. The puppet was made with wire, popsicle sticks, and foam; then covered with various cloths, paint, and drawings. The whole thing was put together with hot glue and sewing. The digital characters were animated frame by frame in Photoshop – I chose to make a frame animation, meaning I have a separate image for each image, rather than redrawing the image for each frame.

The background set for our puppets.
My puppet! Notice that the design is slightly different from the digital version – it’s hard to make the two the same!
It lives! Now we just have to add in the background from above, add lighting, color correct so the puppet, and not the yellow, appears on screen, add music, and add sound effects! Simple, right?
My digital character’s profile.
There’s a lot of frames to an animation! 26 frames for one step – to get across the screen, I have to do that 4 times! That’s over 100 frames! Like the puppet though, I have to add in the background from above, and add shadows, as well as layer him over the background so that he walks behind some objects but in front of others.

Our final project for the Visual Narrative was limited to “a story with no dialogue”, in groups of three. This meant that we could do whatever we wanted, as long as it followed a story and made chronological sense. We chose to animate a fox, who lives in the city but is unhappy enough that he moves to the woods. There, he finds a guitar, and plays it, happy to rest and relax away from all the noise.

One of the original backgrounds I created. Due to the extreme time crunch, we cut out this part of the story, so this background went unused, hence the low quality job – I chose not to continue working on it once we dumped the idea.
One of my partners did the background; the other, the fox. I, however, animated the whole 30 frame animation, in which a car passes by as the fox wags its tail. Not terribly much work, but still time consuming.
A view of the horizon from the forest – I’m very proud of the tree layering I did here – I took work to make sure some trees were over others!
I am incredibly proud of this short, 16 frame animation: The amount of work I put into the mountain with the cloud ring, the trees, layering the bushes over the trees, the grass, and the shadows (ooh, fancy!) was rather too much, considering the amount of time. Unfortunately, I spent so much time designing this scene that I couldn’t animate as many frames as I wished before this project was due.