This piece was commissioned by Scotland.org, to be featured on their website as part of the 2012 Burns Night celebrations.

A work of user-generated animation, the app gave users a chance to upload their own face and see themselves reciting the famous Robert Burns poem, “Address to a Haggis”.

Working with the Whitespace design team, I was faced* with the task of bringing the storyboard for the poetry sequence to life, as well as the development of the facial upload interface itself.

To add to that, the project had be turned around in little over a week to get the finished piece out in time for the Burns Night celebrations.

The interactive animation was created using Adobe Flash, (currently the only feasible technology with which this kind of functionality can be achieved) making heavy use of the inverse kinematics tools to animated the puppets in the poetry sequence.

A deliberately lo-fi art style was used, which thankfully didn’t require complex lip synching. I decided the best approach for this was to move the mouth dynamically, using code to analyse the sound wave and move the jaw accordingly.

*Pun not intended