Link to Animated Poem: Guilt

I wasn’t able to present in class so I have provided an explanation of some of the design choices + my thought process while animating this poem.

Modifications to the poem itself prior to animation include giving the arms and legs more of a curved shape in order to give the appearance of a puppet more than just a stick figure. I also changed the central word to be “me”, rather than “it” and added a couple extra lines to make the strings connect to different parts of the puppet.

Animation process:

I wanted the order the poem is read in to be clear, so I animated the lines in section by section. The word “guilt” is the first to appear and grows bigger and takes up more space throughout the poem, an imposing puppeteer and figure that eventually breaks the rest of the piece (including the marionette).

The handles come in after the puppeteer appears, built up slowly. After that, I wanted the strings of the puppet to look like they were dropping down so I added a typewriter-like effect where the characters in the strings appear moving downwards. For the final string, I wanted to reuse the word “guilt” as part of the sentence “Guilt is the only thing that drives me”. To do this, I emphasized the word before dropping down the final string leading to the puppet that begins with the head “me”. The arms and legs of the marionette appear afterwards, where I used a wiggle effect to show the movement of arms and legs being controlled.

The last part of the animation is intended to show the crushing weight of guilt and how it eventually becomes too much to bear. The handles shatter quickly, and then the strings break free before dissolving. Guilt suddenly drops down rapidly upon the marionette. It is supported briefly before we begin to see the body of the marionette/person crumble. Eventually all that remains is guilt.