Here, I’ve embedded an MP4 which is an update of an animation that I recently created in Adobe’s Animate. It is based on a photo I’d taken several years ago of sticks arranged on the beach which I imagined to be participating in the action that I’ve cast. After I’d taken a photo of the arrangement, I worked the image up in Photoshop for color and contrast levels. I’ve also used the original image in a number of paintings.

For me, the whole set-up is simply intended to be whimsical, farcical, imaginary, with no particular bent toward politics or social commentary. That said, if it evokes anything, I’d have it be a nod to the ineluctable tendency toward competition extant sentient forms at large, with emphasis on ‘at large’.

In this new iteration, I generally tightened up most of the action, striving for better continuity between symbols, compositions, shadows and so forth. I attempted to add some more ‘natural’ movement to the big stick on the left, to make it look more like it was walking (than it had before) by rotating the form back and forth over the timeline using the Free Transform Tool. I created a new shadow for this ‘advancing stick’ tailored to local colors in the animation, and attempted to get this shadow to conform to all the other shadows–and its source–over the timeline. I opted not to use the bone tool, to keep shapes and actions more or less contextual with one another.

I added several seconds of frames to the beginning of the timeline in order to give some space to the introductory retreat march. The drums start first, then the pipes come in as the camera pulls back and pans to the left to introduce the action. A crowd booing comes in three seconds after the pipes start, followed by two more instances of the file. The booing fades out over the last few seconds of each instance. The Scottish march was available as a public domain file. I found most of the other sounds at a site that offers royalty free files.

At 2 ½ seconds a big storm cloud, snipped from an earlier cloud file, comes in from the left and hovers over the big stick on the right.

At 6 ½ seconds the big stick on the left enters, shouting, “Stick in the Mud!”This dialogue bubble is a symbol that I created in Illustrator, exported to Animator.

Next, Giggling is heard as the dialogue bubblefades away into the sky. As the dialogue bubble disappears, the storm cloud sends out thunder soundandlightning flasheswhile the dialogue bubble”OW!” appears. I created these symbols in Illustrator.

Flames, that I created in Illustrator with a radial gradient, appear on the back of the big stick on the right. I applied about an eight to ten-pixel blurto them in Animate, while morphing them with the Free Transform Tool over the timeline.Giggling is once again heard when the fire starts. In each instance of the giggling, the soundfades in,then fades out.