While my sister has never been fan of squash as far as foods go, most people love squash and stretch. People also love snowmen, so I used a squash and stretch technique to illustrate a the snowman jumping up and down in celebration of Christmas. I illustrated the simple movement with the three spheres (snowballs) and then added a carrot, some buttons, and eyes that moved at the same pace.

I used the graph editor to cycle through the movement repeatedly, which was incredibly useful. In future projects, I hope to learn how to apply this animation to multiple iterations of the same object.

Having learned that camera angles play a huge role in good animation, I spent a larger chunk of my time staging the scene. I used three camera angles in the scene, but was most excited about the first and the second shots. Above, you see the train, the passenger, and the tracks in image one, as well as the presents, ornaments, and nature elements in the second image.

Though I modeled a lot of objects in this scene (the railroad tracks, the presents, the mountains, the snow man, amongst other things), I was most proud of how the ornaments came out. Using the Arnold render, I think they turned out really nicely and look like they do in real life. Though they are purposefully sized to be a bit bigger than they would be in your average Christmas ornament set, the small exaggerations make the scene a bit more fun.