GIF

Well, this is it.  I've noticed a problem, though.  The frame rate that I set in Photoshop isn't being preserved when I save the file and try to view it in a browser.  I'll look into this, but here's something for the moment.

This was my first time using Photoshop in this way, so this particular animation became more of a gag than a fully developed statement.  I've always found clowns to be funny, so I thought it might be fun to create something that catered to the kind of zany, over-the-top stunts you might find in your standard circus.  It always seems important for me to add my own humor into the situation, so I ended up coming up with a twist on the classic "snakes in a can" gag.  To add a little bit of history, I decided to use standard depictions of clown archetypes (for more information, this Wikipedia article gives a decent summary) and set the scene in a historic-looking circus setting.  That is the basic narrative.  In terms of aesthetics, I thought it best to keep things simple.  The figures have relatively limited motions, and there is a clear stylistic disconnect between figure and background.  This gives the whole thing a kind of chunky low-tech cartoon or B-movie aesthetic that has always been attractive to me, as well as adding the kind of cultural and iconographic blending that I like to do. I suppose I also learned some useful Photoshop techniques.  Win-win.