Santa Claus Animation
I had this idea to send out an email with a Christmas message to friends and family. My idea was to have what would appear initially as a static picture of Santa and a short message, but while the recepient was reading the message Santa would wink and snow would begin to fall.
First I needed a Santa of my own design so I started sketching. I experimented with eyes, facial features, his hat, and of course his beard.
I was getting close. So I did a sketch in color pencil and really liked him, so I then scanned him into the computer and built a vector file.
Once I had a complete vector of Santa, I created several versions where his eye were in different stages of closing. I used PowerPoint to create an animated slideshow of Santa's wink. Then I isolated a vector of a snowflake and created various sizes. I wanted the flakes in the foreground to be slightly out of focus to give the image the appearance of depth so I applied blurriness to the larger flakes so that it would look like they were falling close to the viewer and some that were sharper that fell in a layer behind Santa. Then I created a final frame for the slideshow where I animated a number of the snowflakes falling down through the frame. Once I was happy with the slideshow's animation I converted it into the GIF file you see at the beginning of this project.
