Fred and Rita

Fred and Rita dance test

One reason why I haven’t posted anything for a while is that I’ve bought my first graphics tablet.

This is something I’ve wondered about, and sometimes resisted, for about twenty years. Recently, however, I’ve been commissioned to produce a short animated explanation for the people I work for four days a week. I wanted to take this opportunity to experiment with animating in my natural, rough, sketchy drawing style, and I knew the tablet could potentially make this possible.

I work for a network of Baptist churches in the West of England, and together with our neighbouring Associations, we want to share the idea of what’s possible through Partnership. The idea of Great Partnerships became part of this, and that gave me the perfect excuse to try drawing what I could never hope to do in real life: dance like Fred and Ginger.

Or, in this case, Fred and Rita, because the moves above are roughly based on a scene from You Were Never Lovelier starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth.

Kind of. Because I’m just practising, and I’m using 6 frames a second to try to save time. That means you’re seeing only a quarter of the pictures per second that you’d see in a Disney film. It does take a ridiculous amount of time, but I do love it. I’m going to get back to it now.