"Beware the Well of Shade, for the shadows run deep through its endless walls and twisting caverns"
I've been messing around with this rig on and off for awhile, but I finally finished this little side project making a short scene in the style of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
I've never been quite happy with how Starswirl the Bearded looked in the show when he finally appeared but, last year I happened upon a really cool fan design of Starswirl by the user Orin311 that I fell in love with. I decided to make a one view puppet rig this year directly based off their vector art as a surprise, complete with show style lip sync and a full walk cycle. One thing led to another in adding a background, a few illustrator texture brushes, multiple sound effects, re-purposing some old fire animation of mine and suddenly it became a whole completed scene. With such a cool wizard design, the choice for using Gandalf's voice to test the rig with was a no brainier. The background is based on the Well of Shade location in the Season 7 finale of MLP.
I had a lot of fun making this and it was great practice for some future personal animation projects I wanna start next year!
Credits for the character design and sound effects listed below
Starswirl fan design by Orin331
Lord of the Rings audio
fire audio
rocks and pebble audio
magic effect audio
horse walking audio
The team that took you to the tiny town of Hatchetfield invites you on a journey to the Lands That Are for the latest StarKid musical adventure, CINDERELLA’S CASTLE.
The Kickstarter launches April 6, 2024.