Commute of the Crow began life as a paper collage that I made, inspired by the works of Gary Russell. I often found myself imagining the scene in motion: Cars whizzing around on roads that looped around skyscrapers, the Crow's outline etched against the over-sized, monochromatic sun, an atmosphere thick with smog from the bustling traffic...

At this point in my life, I was not an Animator or film-maker of any kind. But as my now-husband pointed out to me on a regular basis: "The work you're producing looks more like parts of a story, rather an Illustrations. Why don't you try and make a film instead?"

Taking his advice, I bought a small Rostrum and decided to use the collage as a starting point for a little stop-motion film. The plot was going to be simple: Mr Crowe was late for work and had to get to get there as quickly as possible.

As a beginner, the point of the film was to get a character up and moving about, so I chose to stick with 2D cut-outs of photographs to create the characters, vehicles and interactive objects.

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These puppets were so small that rather than have articulated limbs, I had to make multiple versions of each character and swap them in and out of the scene when needed. Although it restricted the amount of animation that I could do with each character, it was a lot of fun to see how much personality you can give something with just a few little well-timed wiggles.