Penguins have always fascinated me. What attracts one to another? How do they discover their mate? Is it like one huge arctic fourth-grade square dance - boys on one side, girls on the other... now everyone find a partner?

With these questions in mind, I went about writing a penguin greeting ecard script for Valentine's Day. I then handed it off to our 3D designer, Stephen, who thought about how he'd create the card over a warm beverage, then went about creating the animatic you see at right.

What's an animatic? As Stephen explains, "The first set of drawings, known as storyboards, visually represent the action in the script at key moments. Storyboards are often turned into a board-a-matic, sometimes called an animatic, which establishes the duration of each shot in the storyboards as well as the basic camera angles and moves that will be used in the final animation. Rough animation is introduced at this stage to assist in the storytelling and indicate to the animator what action will take place. The main purpose of the animatic is to determine whether the sequence of shots clearly tells the story."

Confident that the animatic did capture the essence of my script, Stephen plowed ahead. Which meant he went about "modeling, texturing and rigging the penguin character." Which is akin to you or I building a skyscraper out of meat scraps and Pixie Sticks. While riding a surfboard.

Here's how Stephen explains this part of the ecard process. (And remember, he's gone to great lengths to simplify his explanation. Making 3D characters is hard.)

"Using reference images, I sculpted a 3D mesh of the penguin and then carefully built the skeleton, which allows the character to move about in the scene. At this stage, the penguin "rig" can be placed on the set and roughly animated along with dozens of duplicated background characters. Even though small (or major!) changes are often made to the rig during production, the rough rig allows the animator to block out the action in a scene and finalize camera angles. Later, the final rig, with hand-painted texture maps, replaces this rough version and the set is dressed with additional textures and lighting. If a scene is considered too complex to render in a single pass, several layers are rendered separately and composited into the final images you see. (An example of that is shown in this movie clip...)"

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Add in about a dozen other shots (a baker's dozen, to be exact), a soundbed, and a heartfelt message at the end, and you have yourself a sweet 3D penguin card for Valentine's Day. Sounds easy enough, but again - that's like you or I redirecting the flow of the Nile with a Baskin Robbins plastic pink spoon.

With a little less than two weeks to go before Valentine's Day, I'm pleased to say that "Lucky Me" - the incredibly short story of one penguin's fortunate discovery of the perfect mate - is now on the My Fun Cards website. And, like all our cards, it's free to send. So... want to see how the card turned out? Watch now.