Animating was the most time-consuming phase of production. Since I was inexperienced in character animation, creating Ornaments was actually a learning process from start to finish. By the time it was about half-finished, I had learned so much that my earlier work looked relatively inferior and needed to be improved.

Character

Santa's movements were designed to be cute and bouncy, yet physically realistic. I tried to make his body parts appear to have mass so that he wouldn't move like a two-ounce plastic toy. His hat turned out to be a great tool for expressing secondary motion as he ran and bumped around. He's quite athletic despite his pudginess and cookie cravings!

Santa's body parts were linked using forward kinematics, with the torso at the top level of the hierarchy. This meant that to animate him walking, I first had to animate the torso's position and rotation. Keyframing the legs followed, and anchoring the feet to the floor meant setting a LOT of keys if the torso was moving.

Using simple bend modifiers, I was able to animate the arms, hands, toes, hat and mouth. When Santa is on the train and airplane, his hat flaps in the wind. This was achieved with an animated noise controller applied to the hat's bend modifier.

Tinsel

Since the tinsel was a bunch of shapes extruded along a roughly helical path up the tree, I made it flex by animating the path itself. To achieve the effect of the candy cane squeezing the tinsel strands as it sped along, I used a cylindrical FFD space warp. The falling tinsel strands were done with a particle system.

MAX's link controller proved tremendously useful when I animated Santa falling off the candy cane, train, and airplane. It also came in handy when animating the train cars themselves.

Train

I expected a lot out of the train, so it was important to set it up correctly. I made each of the train car bodies a child of its wheels, which made it easy to animate them rocking: I simply applied a noise controller to each car's rotation. I then set the caboose wheels as children of the center car's wheels, and did the same between the center car and the engine.

What remained was to animate the train moving around the circular track. I created a dummy object inside the engine and made it the parent of the engine's wheels. After moving the dummy's pivot point to the center of the track circle, starting the train was as simple as rotating the dummy. An expression rotation controller made the engine wheels turn automatically.

All the aforementioned links were configured using the link controller, so I simply unlinked everything when the train cars had to fly off the track. The train crash was then animated manually with the help of a few more dummies.

Airplane

The airplane was configured just as carefully as the train. I used two concentric dummies to animate its motion: one for position, the other for rotation. This made it conceptually easier to animate the plane moving in one direction and facing another, as is the case during a stall. Santa was held to the plane using another dummy centered on his hands. Rotating this dummy allowed his torso to fly up off the plane while his grip remained tight, which happened mostly during negative-G situations.

Since I wanted the plane to look somewhat flimsy, I used bend and twist modifiers to make it flex. And though you might not notice it, the wingtips flutter as the plane is flying. I achieved this subtle effect by linking a wave space warp to the plane and assigning it to the wingtip vertices. By simply animating the wave phase, I could control the speed of the flutter.

Timing

Almost every single shot was timed strictly to the musical accompaniment. That includes the shot duration, camera movement, and object animation. Much as classical songs are a series of melody introductions and their subsequent variations, I tried to coordinate the camera movement to match. For example, if you watch carefully, you will often see a dolly-pan shot followed by a cut, and then a variation on the dolly-pan that roughly coincides with the variation in melody.

Of course, this often meant compromising between the music and cinematography. I had to cut many of the shots more quickly than I wanted to. In retrospect, I would have been less concerned about matching the camera to the music, making the melody subservient to the cinematography instead.