Shuffling Off To Buffalo Fun

Well, I long time ago I came across the sheet music with the directors notes from the 1930's Harmen-Ising cartoon, "Shuffle Off To Buffalo". This is a wonderful piece of history that Stephen Worth put up at the Animation Archive. Finally I did something useful with it. I broke it down and figured out how it worked, then I decided to do a scene for myself. The first one that I did was pretty long, and I used a different layout, a different character, and I didn't quite follow all of the directors notes. Overall, I don't think it would have passed inspection in a studio, but it was fun. I will have to post that later.

On my second go at it, I decided to copying the background exactly, and animate the character that was actually supposed to be animated. I just changed him a little bit. The scene is a lot shorter, but that made it easier to focus on and there was only action going on which made it more fun. This exercise really seems to work well because the only thing that I have to worry about is animating. Everything else, from the character design, to the background to the music and timing is already done for me. So here it is.

Shuffle Off To Buffalo Scene 5 from Tyler Williams on Vimeo.

I put the clip of the actual video at the end, it turned out pretty different, and definitely not as good. The three keys that I used from the original are these three pictures.





Also I just got Toon Boom a little bit ago which is were I animated this. I also inked a beautiful drawing from one of Walt Kelly's early Pogo Books.