An imaginative five-year-old girl from Aberdeenshire has created a stop-motion animation depicting life during lockdown.
Maeve Roche, from Oldmeldrum, pieced together 284 pictures for her 40-second film called Lockdown Lucy.
The short animation shows puppet Lucy at the “same old house”, walking around the “same old garden” and riding around on her “same old scooter” before Lucy comes across a rocket ship that helps her “escape” lockdown.
Maeve and her two other siblings, Hamish, eight, and Martha, three, were learning about writing stories by mum Caroline one afternoon when the idea came to the Meldrum School pupil.
Mrs Roche said: “We had been sitting at the table and Maeve came up with this story about a girl called Lucy who is bored because of lockdown.
“She started to draw the story, but her drawing skills aren’t as great as her storytelling and she was getting frustrated it wasn’t turning out the way she wanted it to.
“I knew about this stop-animation app on my phone and I thought maybe using it could be a way we could tell the story.
“From there it grew arms and legs and Maeve did everything herself – I helped a bit with the puppet but it was all Maeve’s work. I was just her gofer.
“I helped with the engineering of Lucy’s elbows and hips at most.
“After we put together all the 284 pictures, she got to record and narrate her story as she watched the animation.
Mrs Roche said Maeve was “really amazed” by the final product, and has already expressed interest in pursuing future similar projects.
With schools closed and lockdown restrictions still in place, the mum-of-three said it could be a challenge for parents to keep children busy during this time.
She added: “I just think it’s a case of throwing as many things at the wall and hoping that something sticks, but because there’s three of them they tend to keep each other entertained.
“Getting out as much as possible has also been very helpful and finding things to do, instead of sitting inside and thinking ‘this is terrible’.
“The school has also been very good through Google Classrooms and giving them little projects to keep them busy.”
