Christmas Advent Animation -'Twas the Night Before Christmas

Wow. Much Dynamism.

Merry Christmas! I thought I would be seasonal and upload my Advent Calendar animation and all of its development work on Christmas day. That's right, I am that dedicated to my animation work...

(ahem)

Okay, one thing I should clear up is that Blogger gives you an option to change the 'Post Date', the closest thing there is to (faking) time travel. I actually put this up at the end of February in the future of 2015.

Ah well. The development of my Christmas card took quite an interesting a route. We were informed that we were to create a short 30 second piece of animation that had to be Christmas/Winter-related in any form/technique. I gave myself an uncomfortably short timescale of 2 weeks before the deadline (mainly due to the fact I had other work deadlines to be completed before then). 

It all began with a nice new sketchbook to doodle in:

My idea was to have a sort of 'Gangsta' Santa 'cruisin' in his 'pimped-out ride' while listening to his 'jam'. You can tell I'm down with this whole 'ghetto' lingo thing.

I find that I like to get potential shots on to paper first (left) before I organise them into order to structure the film in a coherent format for the narrative.

I planned to use this project as a chance to try out some software. The animation involved was going to be tweened/basic hand-drawn loops to simplify the process. Here is a basic animatic I created on Flash and as you can probably see from this crude effort, I hadn't tried using it before...

So all nice progress for week one: I had the premise for the animation and knew how I would create it. But although I had reduced the story to 30secs, evident in the animatic, it was much simpler in terms of the plot and its content compared to my original plans. There was a niggle in me that I wasn't  quite satisfied with the 30secs version so that it could be doable in the time I had left. 

Still dissatisfied, that weekend I came up with an idea of surreal slapstick carnage that was much more up my street. A late-night doodle of a bionic mouse signaled a departure from gangsta Santa...

The late night doodle that changed everything...

...and a better developed version of the mouse.

Cute little elf = victim

The next week was then wall-to-wall Flash for me but I was now in a far happier place with what I was going to create.

A very basic sketchy composition plan (above) and the different parts of the robot mouse (right.

What was a disappointment was that I had planned to use a Skeleton tool that I heard was available in Flash to rig the different parts of the mouse. Turns out it has been removed from later versions of Flash which I have. So it generally made things a bit more difficult as the shapes were individually tweened and didn't relate to each other in any way. I did manage to cut corners, however, for the colouring by using the bucket tool with graded fills.

And so here is the final edit of the film with sound, titles and credits:

I'm really happy with the end result of the film. I enjoyed creating the comedy and working out the most funny result. I had a few different ideas for how I wanted it to finish (blowing up the hat, blowing up the piece of paper, etc.) but I'm glad I went with this idea in the end.