Scottish Country Dance Animations provides a guide to the steps, formations and dances used at a Scottish ceilidh. Several views are provided as an introduction to learning the basics of Scottish Country Dance. The Dance Movies are best viewed in the original Scottish Country Dance Stage.

In addition to the mechanics of animating dance steps, The Scottish Country Dance Animations required considerable research into the structure and step flow of the dances. During the dance development I set up a discussion forum to get feedback on my project from people interested in Scottish Country Dancing. This provided useful feedback and at some time in the future I hope to continue the development of the animations through contributions to Scottishmist.com.

This was not intend to produce an exhaustive reference work but as an introduction to some of the more popular dance features. The material generated has provided a structured breakdown of how steps, formations and dances are linked. I would also be most grateful for feedback. Most useful would be diagrams, illustrations or photos which show the dance positions or body postures. I'm sure anyone with dance experience will have their vision of a perfect sequence. For the future I hope to produce more natural looking animations with more stylised schematic animations of the steps and formations and better character representation of the dances.

The basic steps used in the dances are quite well defined in the Manual of Scottish Country Dancing published by the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. I identified a list of formations which should cover a reasonable range of dances. The Manual of Scottish Country Dancing describes many variations on these formations.

I know from the feedbak on the original project that there are a lot of people out there who want to learn how to Chelidh. There are also an amazing number of dances in existence. Within the scope of the project I was only able to animate limited sections of three popular dances. Possible candidates for future work include;

The Gay Gordons, The Canadian Barn Dance, Strip the Willow, The Eightsome Reel, The Highland Scottishie, The St Bernard's Waltz, The Circassian Circle andThe Dashing White Sergeant.

Some of you more used to Shrek and Tom Clancey may be forgiven for thinking that the animations look a bit dated. That is because they were produced in early 1999 by a studio of one, when production technology was, to say the least, more limited than today. When time allows.....