5 Little Pumpkins - A Beginner Animation Project Made in Blender
Produced, animated and voiced by Jay Gluckman
Poem by Dan Yaccarino
So I recently finished my first attempt at a Blender project that “tells a story” even though it is a simple one. If you don’t know what Blender is, it’s a free software tool that can be used to make 3d and 2D animation. For me learning Blender has been a pandemic project that I have really enjoyed, but I do have ideas for some animated short projects that are currently way beyond my technical skills in Blender, so I just wanted to push myself to do a project that used skills that I currently have.
The “story” is the pretty well known 5 Pumpkins poem by Dan Yaccarino, internationally acclaimed author and illustrator. I figured this would be a simple concept to animate in several shots and that I could finish the project in a month. Hah! I was wrong. Even such a simple project took way longer.
One of the things I pictured in my mind is that I wanted the last scene to sort of have the pumpkins nicely rolling away into the distance and the darkness of the scene. There were a lot of technical hurdles I had to deal with to make that shot happen. Unfortunately, that shot took most of my resources to create and the quality of the other shots suffered as a result. .
Another challenge was doing the lip synch of the dialog at a couple points. I had never done the process of lip synching dialog and it was really hard to do. In animation schools, I understand that learning to lip synch dialog is a skill that is taught long after the basic skills of animation are mastered. Now I know why. And as well, I now have the deepest of appreciation for those that artfully can lip synch dialog to animation.
So please excuse the rough edges and enjoy….. this project was my first attempt to tell a very simple story with Blender.