The film is part of what’s called The Constitution Project, funded by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. The nonprofit group says it wants to improve civics education and public understanding of democratic institutions. In a related film, for instance, Imbriano examines a crucial Supreme Court case from the 1960s.

The films target a high school audience, or younger. A cartoon embodiment of the Wawona school bill walks through Capitol Hill corridors, slumping in despair when doors shut in its face. A scene from a cheesy old horror movie illustrates the dire fate of most of the 9,000-plus bills introduced in Congress each year: Most die.

“The documentary really shows how hard the process is,” Stauffer said.

You can read the rest here:

http://radanovich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=89920

I was hoping to work with After Effects’ extremely fun Puppet Tool, but the results I got while experimenting were just a little too squishy for this project. (Anyone know some tricks for getting convincing, not-too-exaggerated motion out of it? Even liberal use of the starch tool seemed unhelpful, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out a way to make elbows and knees bend properly.) So for the moment it’s back to IK rigging — and a lot of carefully placed anchor points.

I’m much more satisfied with the results, particularly now that I have a keyframable checkbox parameter that switches the bend direction of the joints. In plain English, I can make someone’s elbows bend both ways — e.g. a character can go from having their hands on their hips to picking something up off the table next to them with very little trouble.

Creating the jurors themselves was a lot of fun — the characters need to function more as archetypes than individuals. The result: a wide range of ages and races and a complete lack of faces.

I now present… my little jury guys (and girls!):

Warning: Do Not Eat.

Well, I’m our animator/graphic designer, so pretty much any visuals — print or motion — that need to be created go through me. I don’t really do character animation; my work is more titles and graphics to explain things — elements to add to the overall ‘look’ of a live-action film rather than the films themselves. I also design most of our project proposals, which is cool because I get to find out what’s in the pipeline.

One of the main things I’ve been working on lately is a set of videos for the Annenberg Foundation’s Constitution Project, a series of educational films designed to make US politics and history relevant to high school civics students. (You can watch them free online at annenbergclassroom.org, but you’ll need to register.) They’re pretty fun viewing and I’ve had a lot of creative freedom with my sequences for them.

Here are some stills from The Making of a Law, coming soon to a school near you! The graphics scheme for this one was based on vintage pop-up books (it begins with a mock fairy tale of the legislative process), so everything has a flat papery look to it. Thanks to my snazzy new blog plugin you can scroll through them image-gallery-style.