I love making holiday cards—I always have. Yet every December, around mid-month, I realize it’s almost Christmas and I haven’t a glimmer of an idea of what to do.
This year, the routine was no different. A few weeks ago, I started looking around my studio at the miscellaneous scraps of cardboard, stickers, styrofoam, and brown paper coffee sleeves I’d collected for inspiration. (Full disclosure: I have a hard time throwing away any piece of sturdy, clean cardboard.) Maybe the materials would guide me to something?
I started building a mini set peppered with coffee sleeve trees, a construction paper sky, torn up paper towel mountains, and a styrofoam (for snow) stage. Then I thought of a bag of googly eyes I keep deep in a box of materials for book events, and played around with them some. I replaced all the tree lights with googly eyes, and made a quick draft of an animation. It was fun and weird….but not quite right. And I was bummed out.
The next morning, I texted the clip to my best friend, Lee for an opinion. He liked it, and encouraged me to carry on. Then a few moments after our initial exchange, he wrote again. “The trees kind of remind me of sharks.” And that was it—the spark I’d needed. The added, unspoken, tinge of subversive humor I could quite grasp on my own. And I was off and running.
At the studio that day, I scrapped my earlier footage and started over. I fine tuned my cast of characters with a special, new guest star—a shark. I built him a Santa hat using a recent acquisition from my mom: her collection of felt scraps. (My mom used to make me felt finger puppets, and full disclosure: she has a hard time throwing away potential craft supplies too.)
Lately, I’ve started dabbling with creating my own sound effects in lieu of using free sounds from online. The Voice Memos app on the iPhone works really well, and is forgivingly simple for an amateur like me. It’s so kooky figuring these things out! That bag of googly eyes I mentioned almost beat out a literal garland of bells for the shark’s sleigh bells sound. And the swimming shark cutting through the icy snow? That’s just a folded up coffee sleeve scrapping against cardboard. Mostly, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I love emersing myself in a let’s-give-it-a-try-and-see-if-it-works-out attitude.
I drew myself a quick storyboard sequence to keep track of the ideas and effects I wanted to include. Last, I played around with lighting…Well, in reality, I played around a cheapo clamp lamp that would stand in for the setting sun.
I’m mostly self-taught when it comes to After Effects, the program I use to build my animations. And I’d be nowhere without help from the occasional YouTube video. What’s so rewarding as I get better at AE, is knowing what I want to do, the effect I think I should use, asking the internet if it exists, and so on. And everytime I use AE, I learn something new. It’s rewarding when it works out and feels like magic! I learned a bunch of things this time.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed a glimpse behind-the-scenes. here it is, the final animation. With a special acknowledgement to my pal, Lee for that extra spark!✨