Greg Chaffins 
The Stick Wars Animation Project is a video I did a while back that shows a lot of action going on between two different groups of stick figures. While at first it appears to be rather focused on just the action, there is a bit of a pattern to what is going on.
For hints, notice that one group is wearing hats, the others are not. Another hint is that the climbers are trying to reach something higher, but being stopped by the hat wearers.
Originated as a Doodle
But something that might be interesting to know about the project is how it originated. The Stick Wars video got its start form a sketch I did while working on a different project (Okay, I can say it, in the middle of a phone conference).
The scene just came together, and after looking at it I decided that it would make for a good animation project. Below is the original image, complete with meeting notes.
Isolate the Actors
The first course of action in creating the animation was to separate the background from the actors and any associated masks. By pulling the image into a graphics program I set about the task of pulling it apart. The figures themselves I knew i was going to recreate in the animation package, so I needed a background without vehicles or figures. Below is the resulting background:
In this process I created my vehicles and simple masks, which gave me the sprites to animate along with the figures. After all, we needed the canon, helicopter, tank, and background covers in order to have the figures use them against each other. Also, I wanted to pull these from the original image instead of re-creating them since it would fit with the original look better. A few of the masks are below:
Time to Animate
Once I have the background and masks I could set upon the task of creating the animation. I used eFrontier’s Anime Studio Pro, and first created a rigged stick figure. Then I imported the background, and by studying the original picture I determined what each figure’s path on the scene would have been in order to get back to the time frame that I wanted to show on the animation.
From there it was just a matter of working backwards from the image and placing the figures on the scene accordingly. This process went really fast once the timeline was established with the first few figures. The masks were treated in the same manner, and soon the project was rendering. The completed animation now christened The Stick Wars Animation Short, with sound track created from sound effect files, was done.
Version 2, with Zoom Windows
After posting the original video, I sat back and looked at the video, deciding that there was a lot of action on the screen that deserved to have a closer look. By taking the original Anime Studio Project I created additional viewports and rendered it again, creating a windowed version of the project,which I called, naturally, The Stick Wars Animation Short 1.5. Same video, multiple new angles.
Fun Project
So, there you have it. A very short animation project taken from original sketch to completion. While hardly belonging in the art category, the project was quite fun to do, and I did enjoy it. One of these days I plan on doing The Stick Wars Animation Project 2.0, but the right doodle has not came along just yet.
