Beginning with 6 oil paintings (created by Ken Dewar) the project involved creating a puppet rig from each of those still images. So, after a lot of cutting, clone-stamping and puppet-tooling, I had 6 fully rigged characters, complete with eye movements and mouth shapes.

The challenge came from the limited movements of the characters. They were painted with a very specific pose, so the range of movement was limited. However, this ended up adding to the hand-made appearance of the piece. Animating on two’s helped cement that hand-crafted feeling.

Lastly, I had to create transitions from live footage to the animated characters. This took a lot of planning to get the shots just right.