The Gift of the Dinosaur

I finally finished my latest animation on the day before Thanksgiving. For the past year-and-a-half I’ve been attending the animation meetups that are held on Sunday afternoons at the Greenbelt Makerspace and we decided to do some special short Christmas animations that would run in the monitors that were recently erected in the windows of the makerspace. Even though our animations aren’t due for another few weeks I decided to take advantage of this week’s enforced downtime due to Thanksgiving Day (it’s hard to find work because so many people are currently out of town) and get mine done early so I can focus on other things. So here is my latest animation, The Gift of the Dinosaur.

Here’s the story behind The Gift of the Dinosaur. I had participated in Inktober for the first time in 2017. On the day I was leaving for the Washington, DC chapter of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School I did a quick drawing featuring the event’s emcee, Reverend Valentine. She is a burlesque performer and she loves dinosaurs. Recently Build-A-Bear Workshop had started carrying dinosaurs that one could choose to have stuffed and take home instead of a teddy bear and it had a blue t-rex dinosaur. So I drew this scenario where Reverend Valentine gets the blue t-rex from Build-A-Bear Workshop while wearing her pasties and thong while adding a fantasy scenario of what if that stuffed dinosaur was real. (LOL!)

For my animation I loosely based the girl on what I imagine Reverend Valentine might have looked like as a child but I basically made a more generic child. Since the main human character is a young child I had to replace the pasties and thong with a nightgown since, like many children around the world, she would be opening her present on Christmas morning soon after waking up.

I’ll admit that I ripped off the original premise of the Jurassic Park movies (dinosaurs cloned from the blood drank by mosquitos that were preserved in amber for thousands of years). For the record, I saw the first Jurassic Park movie and I really enjoyed it. I saw the second movie and, while it had its moments, I felt it was just a retread of the first one. I haven’t seen any of the other Jurassic Park or Jurassic World movies since the first two were released mainly because going to the movies have become so expensive that I’m not willing to pay a lot of money to see the same storyline being rehashed over and over again. It would be cheaper to just buy the DVD of the first movie and watch that one over and over again.

I was also inspired in a way from reading a series of graphic novel reprints of the comic book series Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, which I checked out of the local public library. As you can tell from the title, it’s about a girl and her dinosaur. It’s a really well-written series and I enjoyed them. If I ever earn a decent income to the point where I can afford splurges, I will buy that series because it is that good. My animation focuses exclusively on the dark side of getting a pet dinosaur. (LOL!)

For the software I decided to try this free graphics program that I downloaded a few months ago. It’s from Autodesk and it’s called SketchBook. The free version has a lot of features including doing a rough flip book animation. I took a course on Lynda.com (which I’m able to access for free through my public library) on SketchBook Pro and I found that the main difference between the free and paid pro versions is that the latter has more brushes to choose from.

I did the vocalizations and sound effects using the free open source program Audacity. I basically pushed my voice into the upper ranges in order to have the girl say things like “ooooohhh” and “wow”. I decided to do my own sound effects instead of spending time doing Internet searches for the proper sounds. I did the unraveling of the ribbon by taking a roll of toilet paper and unraveling that. I ripped up a sheet of paper in order to simulate the sound of the girl ripping wrapping paper. I did the rattling box effect by dropping a box full of unbreakable stuff then putting that sound on a loop. I ripped velcro to simulate the dinosaur emerging from the box. For the falling Christmas tree I knocked over a padded guitar case with the guitar still inside. For the final scene I purchased a bag of pretzels and recorded myself eating them. I recorded my own burp after I ate a meal that’s heavy in gas then drank down a glass of water mixed with baking soda.

As for the music, it’s the song “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” from Tchaikovsky’s famous Christmas piece The Nutcracker Suite. I downloaded this version for free from YouTube’s collection of songs that creators can use for free in their videos.

I did most of the drawings but, to save time, I turned to OpenClipArt.org for the Christmas tree, the wallpaper, and the couch. All three were basically background elements so I didn’t feel the need to spend the time drawing them and it left me free to focus on what really mattered, the girl and the dinosaur.

For those of you who have been following my animations over the years, you’ll probably recognize a painting in the background hanging over the couch. It’s the final scene from my earlier animation The March of Liberty, which is the same animation that was shown outside on a giant screen at the 2017 Light City festival in Baltimore.

The animation wasn’t too bad except I found that animating the opening of the present to be a bit tedious and it drove me crazy at times. But it was worth it at the end when I saw the litter girl eagerly opening her present. If someone was paying me, I would have been more obsessive about accurately showing the girl opening her present to the point of doing a live action filming of myself unwrapping a box so I could use that as the basis of doing a very accurate gift opening. But I’m not being paid to do this. I really need to focus more on finding work that pays money so I could pay the bills so I had to simplify it to the best that I could. It was still tedious to animate the opening the gift part despite trying to simplify it as much as possible. The rest of the animation was less tedious and I was able to enjoy the process better.

I basically exported the animation and sound effects from the separate programs and assembled them with the music together in iMovie.

Thankfully I was instructed to make a short animation so I had no problem with doing this one by myself within a week. I decided to upload this animation online since not everyone will be able to go to the Greenbelt Makerspace and see it in the video windows.

I’m basically happy with the way the animation turned out. It’s a short animation that has a coherent story and I was able to make it run in just under one minute. I’m glad that I finished this animation so I can move on to other things.

Video Break

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

For a change of pace today, I’d thought I’d feature an actual full-length movie in this blog. Here is Pyotr Illch Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker as performed by the BBC Royal Opera House.