Shot Glass Peep

Birds in Hats Animatic Test on Vimeo
Postage stamp-sized, super low res version of the first few frames of the Birds in Hats animatic sequence. It was made to test (my theoretical) method of creating an animation this way and to see how the movements might look.

Well, that was completely enjoyable to do! I could create these frames all day. It's so easy, it makes me wonder if everybody else has been doing this and I just didn't know. Animate the prop, save a copy of the frame, rinse, repeat. iMovie, which I love now, can craft the frames into a workable little animation test. I believe the actual 3D puppet animations in Halfland will have more personality and hopefully their performances will be more nuanced than I'd care to produce with these 2D illustration clips. They really are just fancy storyboards.

The mini clip above is 13 frames with cross dissolves inbetwix each one. The sounds were at hand, already loaded into iMovie. The box thumping sound is a manipulated "footstep". I made this first test, of a test, so low res and small because I didn't want to jam my ram with trying to edit large image files while I was just after a quick answer as to whether this technique would work at all. I'm happy to report I think that it will.

Tomorrow I'll try to create a bit more of the scene and render it at a higher resolution so we don't have to view the story through a shot glass.