... I'd spend most of my time making short animated films

This past weekend, our church hosted a Sweetheart Pot-Luck Dinner. The husbands/ boyfriends were expected to prepare an entree and either a salad, side dish, or desert. Also, each guy was told to have some demonstration of their "talents" to perform during an after-dinner program.

About a week-and-a-half beforehand, Bob Harbert suggested we co-prepare some entertainment. We brainstormed a bit, and settled on a really cool idea.

A Really Cool Idea

About half-a-year ago, Cartoon Network had a contest for it's viewers to design a 30 second commercial for one of its shows, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. In the contest, Cartoon Network made available a selection of background music that could be used. One of the selections was a particularly catchy eastern-themed piece that I liked. I envisioned creating a commercial of animated Harvey Birdman-themed shadow puppets. Sadly, I procrastinated enough that I failed to ever realize my shadow puppet dream.

During our Sweetheart Dinner brainstorming session, I told Bob how I'd always wanted to make a short shadow puppet movie, and I suggested we could do one for the sweetheart dinner. I would write and animate a short story that Bob would narrate. I planned to burn the movie to a DVD that we could take to the dinner and pretty much WOW the crowd.

So, I set about writing a simple romantic short story that would work as a shadow puppet show. I decided to have the characters be tigers to fit with the Eastern origins of shadow puppetry. I intended to basically adapt the "Gift of the Magi" story as a Valentine tale. But, once I got into it, I realized just how obvious the "Gift of the Magi" ending is. So I set about changing the story to be more of an "accidental" love story where the protagonist unwittingly/ unknowingly does something romantic. That lead me to write "Strong Magic."

I went up to Bob's house one night and recorded him narrating the story. Then over the next few days, I drew out the character puppets and sets, and animated them in Macromedia Flash. I finished animating everything a little before noon the day of the dinner.

I then spent the next five hours unsuccessfully trying to compress the animation into the proper format for a DVD. About thirty minutes before the dinner, I had to give up and admit defeat. While taking my pre-dinner shower I realized we could still salvage something out of my failed efforts. So, I quickly printed black-and-white copies of the main characters and sets.

At the dinner, I updated Bob on my inability to create the DVD and told him that he'd have to read the story while I manually performed the puppet show in front of a white board.

All-in-all, the show went pretty well. While it was nowhere as cool as the unseen digital version I'd created, the live version was still entertaining (if for no other reason than it was funny watching me try to manipulate so many puppets with two kitchen tongs).

Anyway, our talent was a success. In the future, I'll need to leave more time to actually write the DVD.

Oh well. Since then, I've had some time to create a small web version of the movie that can be viewed here. Also, Alli filmed our live performance. A summary of which, is available here as well.