Choose a subject you are passionate about. I am pretty passionate about haggis, whenever I am back in Scotland I aim to consume at least my body weight in the stuff and for many years my dad and I whenever we were out and about would attempt to try as many different haggises as possible and then rate them based on their taste, texture, greasiness etc, (if anyone is ever in Scotland and interested the best we found was from a butchers in West Calder, the worst came from a Scottish shop in Vancouver).

There could be haggi in them thar hills!

I decided to try and do a sort of pseudo nature documentary around the common fib told to tourists who don’t really know what haggis is and since I don’t have any actual haggi lying around I decided to do it as an animation. Initially I was just going to do still images but decided that wouldn’t be very exciting so decided to play around with making animations in Photoshop, I’m not going to claim any brilliance but its at least more interesting that still images. I thought it would be funny to enlist some other Scottish people (namely my parents) to do the narration and really ham up the accent and the lowland Scots dialect then add subtitles in “normal” English. Getting the subtitles in place was a bit of a bear, tantrums were nearly thrown but I won out in the end.

I certainly need more practice with Premiere to get my audio sounding right, I messed with it in Audition as best as I could but I’m still not sure its right. The same probably applies to the whole video, much like anything else you make yourself and stare at for probably 40 to 60 hours I have no concept of whether its all that great but there we go. Doing the animations was kinda fun and I may revisit it again but possibly after a lengthy break and a lie down in a darkened room!

By: Fiona Harlan