Animating Childrens Drawings

For a while now since BAF and more so from Creative Futures I've wanted to animate some children's drawings as a new challenge and to try something different. So whilst I was home for Easter I asked a 6 year old girl that I know if she would do a drawing of me and explained that I wanted to animate it, I also asked her to draw me  something I could put in the background like the seaside or a house or a castle..it could be anything! And so she drew me as a princess, a castle and the added bonus of my cat Amber! 

Now I had the drawings I decided that I would animate my character singing and wishing the girl that drew the picture happy birthday as it's her birthday at the end of the month, instead of getting her a card!

This is the process I went through to prepare for animating

This is the original drawing of myself and my cat

I then made the background completely white

This is the original castle drawing

I also made the background completely white for this

I then added in bits for the background like the sky and ground

And finally myself and my cat were added into frame.

Then broke down the drawing of my self so that the arms, head, neck, torso etc were separate ready to animate. I also created different mouth shapes. 

This is the final animation, I use my own voice and I did the cat noises. I found the bird sounds from a royalty free website and added in a quick title and credits. 

Overall I'm very happy with the outcome of this animation, I enjoyed making it and would love to use children's drawings for another animation, maybe for a bigger project. The great thing about it is when you ask for a drawing you don't know what you're going to get to work with!