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Friday, December 14, 2012

Best Wishes for the New Year

The last few years, I have prepared animated gifs for sending electronic greetings. Several weeks ago, I decided to use this marionette I purchased from the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) to make a movie. Thus began my getting acquainted with its controls.

It was really a display model, but the strings do work the puppet. Over the weeks, while waiting for enough natural lighting to film, I learned to simulate dance or rather skating moves. A couple of days earlier I found the shoulder strings could mimic this.

Now, the difficult part was how to manipulate the puppet with one hand, either left or right, when I have to still operate the camera. That entailed practicing through watching the camera's flip screen.

Without too much planning, I proceeded to capture random scenes, with the final frame being the puppet fallen as if it had crashed into a gift box. Included background audio from a Christmas CD. I snapped a still image of that last frame for a gif to achieved the desired transition. Fortunately for this video, I just needed the first and last image, since I used a WeVideo preset style. Good to know that WeVideo now provides editable transitions and effects as well.

I was rather pleased with the results. As I have yet to make my dream paper puppet come to life, I was happy with the staging involved in this project. It's back to making animated gifs, until next year.

In case you were wondering. This was sold as a Pinocchio. My snowman marionette would have been a more appropriate choice, but this one works better.

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My aspiration is to be better at telling stories. I only need a pencil and paper.