I had just watched Charlie Chaplin film “The Circus” and caught that inspiration bug! Next thing I knew I was plotting a silent film script and learning Blender 3D to make some sort of animation for it.

Working within the limitations of my animation skills, the simple limb movements of wooden toys was really the only manageable characters I could use, and the story was adapted around them.

IIRC it took a month or two for the music and animation, and I was learning what I was doing as I was doing it – so while the learning curve was steep, there are plenty of techniques I worked out on the fly that I keep in my story telling toolkit, that came from this project.

The main character, Hobo, later found a nice conclusion in The Day the Clown Died which is a much better story, but ‘Scared Clown Town’ was a big step forward in my involvement in the medium. The task of story telling without dialog wasn’t as easy as I first thought.