This was the fourth year of these cards and I'd always wanted to do something with penguins and decided it would be cute if they could be step dancing with their little paddly feet. Once that decision was made, the bagpipes were a natural, what with the penguins not having lips and all.

A short sequence was scripted so it wouldn't just be forty seconds of paddlin' puffin' penguins.

It was a lot of fun drawing the penguins. Along the way they took on distinct personalities that were integrated into the story. Their names, from left to right, are: Casey, Angus, Declan and Rocky.

The soundtrack presented a unique challenge. Broad liberties were taken with the arrangement to keep the song short. The sounds were a real learning experience. Everything was created, recorded and filtered in a Yamaha QY100 then imported into the Mac. Each penguin's bagpipe had a different voice and each penguin's feet made unique tapping sounds.

Reverb effects and levels were tweaked into the wee hours to put the penguins in a convincing aural environment. I remembered how sounds used to feel when I was delivering newspapers in minus thirty degree weather and went for that same feel. You can also hear the the sound fall and rise again as Angus and Declan drop out and Casey and Rocky try to make up for them.

The complex soundtrack really taxes processors on playback, so the movie had to be reduced to a mere 12fps. Blur effects were used to simulate higher frame rates.

It was a great feeling to see the finished project. All the technical considerations coordinated to become transparent and all we see are four penguins step dancing and playing bagpipes. As it should be.

We loaded them up on a covert Avro Arrow! The bigger issue was keeping the goggled helmets from slipping off our chinless friends...

Liquour can bridge any divide! Not for the kids, of course.

All graphics were created in Flash. As a rule, I prefer to build vector stuff in Illustrator, but decided to do everything in Flash this time around. For the technically inclined, I used Flash 5 on a 350mhz Mac. (Classic, natch!)

The musical arrangement was composed on a Yamaha QY100 with all internal digital effects. The sound files were imported into Flash as a single aiff and compressed there.