E4 Sting 2013 - Stolen Kiss

This year, I finally managed to get my bum into gear and enter a small hand drawn affair into the annual E Stings competition! Although depite starting 2 months in advance, I still had a bit of a rush before the deadline; as well as a day of crippling doubt in which I was thinking of starting my E Sting all over again! But I stuck to my original idea (as common sense reared its sensible head), and here is the end result...


E4 Sting 2013 - Stolen Kiss from Nafftastic on Vimeo.

The idea came from my recent reading of the epic novel 'Gone with the Wind'. I wanted to try and capture the love/hate relationship between the two main characters, Scarlett and Rhett whilst combining it with the E4 aesthetic and sense of humour. So thar we have it!

Now heres a quick "low down" on the process of making this video!

Firstly, I had to figure out what sort of medium I wanted to do it in. I knew I wanted to do most of it by hand if possible, but as a completely hand-drawn animation would have been a rather time consuming process, I went for the next best option... puppet animation!
I went a-researching, and found some pretty lovely animations made by the very talented Oliver Postgate:

(Noggin the Nog was my favourite one).

Inspired and feeling much more informed, I went on to storyboarding and playing with composition...

Once I was happy with that, I cracked on with drawing out all the puppet's body parts in all the various positions I could imagine they needed...

I then used watercolour to paint all the limbs...

These limbs were then all cut out and scanned into the computer.

(I ended up with a big old pile of limbs).

And the computery stage began! I animated the everything in Flash and added a few special effects (like the glowing moon).

I completed the animation by using After Effects to add music (provided by E4) and a nice grainy film texture to give the my animation an old-y film feel!

And that was that! I entered the competition a day before the deadline, and I've been having a look at other people's work since! Here are two of my favourites whom I think are two definite contenders for winning the competition this year!