(dynamic music) (camera clicking) ♪ Sun arising ♪ (camera clicking) ♪ East, he's ♪ - Hi, I'm Ali Clark.

And Daisy Winfrey and I are working on a title sequence for a new show by Alabama Public Television called Journey Proud.

And this is behind the scenes.

(upbeat music) This project really started getting going when Daisy Winfrey, the artist on the project, put together a bunch of drawings for all of the nine scenes.

And I got a few friends together, and we cut out like a million pieces of paper.

It was so much easier with their help.

(energetic music) For each of the nine scenes in the intro, Daisy referenced the actual cities.

And really studied what, I mean, even like what the mountains looked like in that area, just so that we could have a really accurate portrayal of what that region of the state looked like.

These are all the scenes that Daisy's done.

This is a tractor, but it's not gonna make it in.

This one, for Birmingham, is really awesome.

This has a little tab in the back that you can move, and it moves the eyes.

This tab right here moves the tongue.

These are, like this is the background.

And when you line it up, it looks like that.

This one's really cool.

'Cause it has a little flag right here, and there's a tab through the back so that the flag can wave.

And these are the trucks.

And the wheels are here, spinnable.

I asked Daisy really nicely if she would make the dog on the front porch look like my dog, Emma.

And she did.

(dynamic music) The animation table that I built is a multiplane animation table with five layers of glass.

And this is a design that's commonly attributed to Disney, but it was actually first invented by Lotte Reiniger in the early 1920s, when she did the first animated feature length film, Prince Achmed, in 1926.

So one of the advantages of using a multiplane animation table is that your image is not like completely flat.

Like you're all of the interesting parts of an image and you're separating those out sort of in like a 3D space.

So that means that you can focus on what's in the foreground.

And then the camera can like focus on what's in the background.

Sort of similar to the way that you would perceive something that's like very close up, or something that's like really far away.

So by having all of those different layers on the animation table, you're really creating a more realistic space, instead of just having like a totally flat image.

This program has onion skinning in it.

So right now you're seeing a live view of from the camera, but you're also seeing the previous frame.

So, that way I can look at, I can move, like when I move the sun, I can still see the previous frame and judge how far something needs to move, in order to take the next frame.

Once you get everything where you want it, you just shoot another frame.

(bright music) So we've been working on this for a few months now, and it may ultimately only end up being a 30 second title sequence.

But, it really is a labor of love because sometimes it's just fun to cut things out of paper and to animate things the way that it used to be done.

And I really love it, and I'm really happy I got to work on this project.