Friday, January 2, 2015

animal advent ala ed emberley: director's commentary 21-25

Day 21: Gorilla

The copy of Emberley's book I grew up with had a square on the back cover and the caption "What can you make from this shape? An Ape!"

I made this one fairly early on in the sequence, after the whale, and when i started thinking that every puppet should have some kind of interaction. Its zoom effect is testament to how I made every puppet scalable - most of the puppets don't leverage that much, but I tried to reduce the amount of magic numbers and hardcoding.

Day 22: Giraffe

Actually, this is one of the few others that does use the scaling as well! These entries from the last few pages of the book really have a lot of nice detail and elegance.
Day 23: Alligator

On the home stretch. The disorder of the boxes really adds to the personality of this one, and I worked to make the jaw snap.
Day 24: Dragon

What a beauty this one is! Very tricky making all those funky S-shapes. The fire and smoke was my own creation. I was pleased with the way I got the legs moving.
Day 25: Santa!

The only one that is my own design - and that has its own color palette, distinct from the animal puppets. (It's funny comparing his design to my old Advent santaskate - that the two are so similar reinforces the idea that Emberley was a lasting influence that I reinvoked when I started making processing applets without importing graphics.)

This Santa is actually an homage to a cardboard advent calendar I grew up with, and still makes a seasonal appearance at my mom's house... I made an animated GIF of it a while back, but the short of it is for my folks the pullstring was a slightly naughty joke.

I think I recycled some code from the whale for the presents, but added rotation. (Come to think of it, it's just my old Advent giftplosion.)


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