Jaguar

Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

This animation was the result of a challenge from wildlife photographer Nick Gordon (left) who specialises in filming South American animals. He handed me a video of a jaguar walking and swimming. Here's my attempt to capture its walk in a looping animation.

Using twelve frames (artwork on A4 paper, right) I was able to have:

• The foreground tree going past in the full 12 frames

• The two middle distance trees going halfway across the frame in the same 12 frames (but if the illusion works it should look as if one middle distance tree takes 24 frames to get right across the frame)

• The four background trees go a quarter of the way each in the same 12 frames, so hopefully it looks as if each individual background tree takes a leisurely 48 frames to cross the frame.

Clever eh? With over 100 spots on each of those 12 jaguar drawings this involved an awful lot of drawing!

Related Link

Sadly Nick Gordon died in on April 25th 2004 in Venezeula at the beginning of a filming expedition.

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk