Slugbunny Takes The Cake Pt 1 – animation by Bradfield Dumpleton 2015
THE GIFT THAT KEPT ON GIVING: SLUGBUNNY CAKE ANIMATIONS 1-3
In March this year I had my 300th birthday, and while I usually don’t bother celebrating, my friend Heidi thought I should break tradition & made me a gorgeous chocolate mud-lathered-in-slabs-of-icing SLUGBUNNY CAKE!
For some reason it tickled my cartoonist mind and I found myself making animation experiments with the cake as it passed through various stages of getting gobbled. My kids also helped out with ideas, making bizarre characters, adding music & sound effects, and of course a lot of co-gobbling. The end results are brief, but the whole process spanned many days, and involved a smorgasboard of creative family activity – paper construction, Fimo-building sessions, playing music & recording, philosophical discussions, researching techniques from other animated movies, and lots of tea & cake.
Having not really tried stop-frame animation before, it was a fantastic learning curve for all of us. We used a wonderful animation app on my iPad called Animation Creator, which I acquired a couple of years ago for hand-drawn animation experiments like this:
Flying Paper – animation by Bradfield Dumpleton 2013
The first two Cake animations are a bit rough – the camera was hand-held so the frames jiggle around a lot, and we were still working out how to time the flow of movement and to think sequentially. By Part 3, I’d improvised a tripod for the camera using my daughter’s music stand, and had a much better idea of how to plan frames and edit. Still pretty rough, but in the end, a really rich creative experience and a great way to savour a delicious birthday gift!
Slugbunny Takes The Cake Pt 2 – animation by Bradfield Dumpleton 2015
Slugbunny Takes The Cake Pt 3 – animation by Bradfield Dumpleton 2015