Christmas Advent Animation (Puddings Last Christmas)



Puddings Last Christmas- Tyler Carrigan from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

For our Christmas project we were given the task of creating a 30 second animation that would be shown on one of the days leading up to Christmas on the ECA advent calendar. With this in mind I began to brainstorm ideas of what I could possibly do. I knew I wanted my animation to have a basic narrative, having something that was quite funny but something that was also easy to do at the same time. I played around with a few ideas initially but finally came to one that surrounded the character of a Christmas pudding.

The basic idea was that I would have the Christmas pudding character visiting the log cabin of another character. As it journeyed to the cabin I wanted to show it essentially gaining all of the traits and decorations the Christmas pudding is famous for, its white sugar coated powder, the placing of holly on top and it being lit on fire. The way I was going to convey this was by it being essentially decorated as it walked to the log cabin. Showing this happening almost coincidentally, making it seem quite humorous.

I came up with the idea of snow giving the pudding its white powder, it falling on top of it in some way. I originally was going to have it falling off a tree but then decided to have it slide off the roof of the cabin as it knocked on the door, so as the other character opened the door we would see just a mound of snow of which the pudding would rise out of, revealing its front. I equally planed to have holly hanging above the door so as the pudding stood up we would see it falling on top of its head completing its look. Finally to end the animation I wanted to show the pudding being lit on fire in some way. I ended up having the idea of making the pudding trip into the fireplace, screaming as it did so, giving it a very slap stick comedic feel. All though I also think it is something which can be seen as quite dark but hopefully at the same time quite funny.

I firstly began to draw some character concepts, mainly of the pudding character as he is the main focus of the animation.  As I began to do so I knew I wanted to give it facial features, creating different faces for it but as I did so It led me to incorporating the dripping side bits of the white powder on top of his head into its eyes which gave the character a more original friendly look, of which I was overall quite happy with.

Next I planned out my film using a story board so that I knew what each scene would look like, story boards being particularly useful when it comes to planning the camera angles of a scene, the way the characters are in a shot and also giving you a overall visual representation of the way your story is going to play out. Now understanding how indeed each scene would look, I went ahead and began to draw the backgrounds first as this would allow me to animate over the top making character placement easier when it came to animating.

I created the whole animation in photoshop, animating each scene by turning off and on layers that I had drawn over the backgrounds. It as a whole consisted of 9 scenes in total, within which I had to animate, colour, shade and highlight each frame, background and character and lets just say I had my work cut out for me. I only had time to animate and edit within a 2 week period, and even for a 30 second animation was not much time.

Animating the Pudding in Photoshop

 My 2 weeks mainly consisted of  me having to do all-nighters, which looking back I realise that it was my own fault due to the fact that I made my animation quite polished, but at the same time I felt the end result was worth it but next time I may just make things a bit less detailed!  I ran into problems with after effects when editing again as I had actually added snow falling in the outside scenes but I couldn't get it to render in the proper 1920x1080 format so to finish the film with in the dead line I ended up just leaving it out. Besides this hiccup, I added a title, credit sequence and music in premier which did not take to much time and overall tied everything together finally.

Overall after the 2 weeks of having not much sleep I finally managed to get it done. I was very happy that it was over but at the same time I was equally pleased with what I had achieved and how the film turned out in the end.



Bye!