Huntington University is saying "Merry Christmas" this year with an original stop-motion animated tale.
Accompanied by Christmas favorites such as "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Jack Frost" and "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town," the 24-second video follows Huntington's mascot, Norm the Forester, as he decorates a tree for Christmas.

Animators Curtis Wood and Chris Veil, both 2010 HU graduates, created the video with the help of the digital media arts faculty and others the department.

"We were very fortunate to get help from some very talented people such as Tyler Welker who did the post editing, Dawn Ford and Grant Fitzgerald who did the sound design, Cara Bolley who built the armature, and Josh Doolan and Yohan Lee who built and animated the tree," Wood says.

The entire production, from creating the puppet to animating the video, took about 170 hours over a four-month period, Wood says.

The video can be viewed online at www.youtube.com/huntingtonuniversity.