Creating Our Cruachan Animation

Over the past year, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum and Historic Environment Scotland partnered with the Foundation Apprenticeship in Creative and Digital Media students at Forth Valley College, Stirling, to create a video based on the Cruachan Story, which was orinigally illustrated by Sylivia Troon. You can watch this video here: https://argylls.co.uk/cruachan/

Below, Gabriel, one of the students from this course talks about their experience of this process, what they learned, and what they enjoyed about this:

The animation was adapted from the book “Cruachan” by Sylvia Troon. We used this as our starting point, reading through and making our own (slight) changes to the story, and jotted down some initial ideas for the animation. We split the story into 12 chunks to make it easier to organize and we all took charge of creating a storyboard for at least one of the sections. Next, we put all the parts together and began to plan what puppets, backgrounds, characters and props we would need to create the animation. Collectively we then wrote a script, using the notes made from the book and the storyboards. We edited the script to make sure our story made sense and that we would be able to animate it.

Once the script was finalized and had the go ahead from the client, we started work on the puppets, taking inspiration from the book’s illustrations while adding our own touches. The puppets were first drawn on paper, with all the moving parts drawn on their own, then photocopied onto card, then cut out and put together with split pins. This allowed the parts to move (the arms, legs and head for example).

The audio was created for the animation by first recording the script and adding the audio files to the animation software (this is so we could make sure what was happening on screen matched up to what the narrator was saying). The rest of the sound effects were taken from a free sound website and added in during the editing.

The animation was created one frame at a time (taking a picture of every frame), and was done on a green screen, while the backgrounds were edited in afterwards. We had a camera set up ‘looking down’ on a table while plugged into a computer. The animation process itself took roughly 3 months for the class to fully complete. The longest part of the process was designing and creating the puppets and the backgrounds. We made at least 2 versions of every puppet before we were happy with them and we had to work on all the props, like the pebble, the brush and the music notes, plus many more.

In what was a successful attempt to make editing easier and faster, the animation was done in its twelve parts. This meant the animation didn’t need to be made in order, and we could skip sections where we didn’t have enough characters or props created yet. It was then put back in order in the edit.

In the end the animation (while only lasting three or so minutes) took a team of 10 people plus our Lecturer’s help and roughly 10 months’ work. We all had fun creating it, gained lots of new skills and we hope those who see it enjoy the movie!

Written by Gabriel McGuckin, student on the Foundation Apprenticeship in Creative and Digital Media course

Please be sure to watch the animation Gabriel was part of. You can find the link to this at the start of the blog.