Garden

Today I was rummaging around the house thinking about perhaps being responsible and picking some things up that have been laying around. I didn't manage to get very far as I stumbled across some drawings that my niece made as gifts for me. Hmmm...... didn't I say I would animate these? Ummmm, tap, tap, yep, I sure did... time to get on the computer and get creative, sorry house (not so much)! I looked through the drawings and selected the ones that had the less overlapping in them, so that I could isolate the parts easier.
Before I began I was careful to make a mental note of respecting the purity of the drawings and not get carried away adding color or special effects as it's the innocence and simplicity that makes this interesting.The first scene of the animation (the black and white character) I removed the outside space surrounding the character. I made duplicates of my layers and I went through making individual changes on each layer, selecting the arms and moving them, the eye blink etc. I saved them as jpgs and then imported them into Combustion where I extended the length of each jpg and added the text and of course animated.
The second scene, I also cut each object out from the background so that I had individual parts but saved them as gifs so that they could be layered over each other. Each flower (including my new textured "extra" flowers), two versions of the people - one set with elongated heads for the pulling "birth" (so to speak) effect from the flower, the grass etc. were blended, scaled, and animated all in Combustion. Once rendered from there I pulled the footage into Vegas to get rid of a buggy frame, add credits and the music (I had to cut and lengthen the last section of that song so that it sounds like it's ending - his voice doesn't really sound slowed down like that). This song is one of my favorite little enchanments (got to love the child singing). I was even trying just last night to set it as a ring tone on my new cell phone, but I couldn't get it to work (it might be too long - I haven't looked into it) anyway, it was gratifying to be able to apply this song to what feels like its rightful home. I think it works well with the whole theme. Click here to go download the animation The Garden.
Hope you like it Veronica.