Animating Scrooge

Perhaps the biggest drawn animation challenge in this film was this climactic scene of scrooge begging for a chance of redemption and change “the writing on this stone”. Animating a character whose emotions you believe in is the hardest of animation challenges. On top of this, we had a lot of cloth animation, from Scrooge’s nightgown, hat, and the robes of Christmas Future, all of which have their own motion paths. James McKay drew the character keys and I roughed out the animation of the falling drapes of Christmas Future.

Kat Owens Assisting

I worked closely with my assistant animator, Kat Owens, a graduate from Arts University Bournemouth who began the process of cleaning up the keys, to make each one look like a James McKay drawing, and then breaking down the character movement, and all of the timing subtleties that give weight and believability to this movement. Once we have this, the next stage is ink and paint. To make sure we don’t get our many tones of grey mixed up, we colour with vivid primary colours, before changing these to the final colours you’ll see in the film, along with the extra tones to give this dimension.

IN describing her role as assistant animator, Kat said,

I helped the Lead animator in producing animation. Some of my tasks included: Inbetweening, taking my assigned animation and adding drawings inbetween to create a smooth movement; animating shadows in cloth and curtains and adding colour to the animation. Overall, my experience on this production has been a joyous, learning curve that I'm grateful to have been a part of. I've been able to work with new people, learn, and practice new skills which have made me improve as an animator. It has also left me feeling more confident about my ability to animate and work within a team, despite being at home with my cat for my entire time on the production. I'm thankful to the team for allowing me to contribute to "A Christmas Carol" and I'm excited to see the production come together.