basically put down your ideas on rules. or weather you think the old ones are ok.
these are the old ones:
Rules: You have one month to finish the animation. Other then that anything goes in this session.
You will need to submit the following milestones:
Planning thumbnails
Blocking
Revision
Final
Final submission needs to be quicktime sorenson or WMP cinepak encoded 640 x 480 movie file. Prior submissions can be of lower res to minimize file size.
personally i reckon ignore the milestones as posting them takes time you could be spending animating. anyone agree up to you guys really i happy doing both just think its better to keep it simple.
hmmm, i reckon something in between. i agree, too many milestones can cramp your style, take up time, but i do think what might be nice is a simple story board. this way people get an idea what you are doing, once the story board is done, you can then focus on making a polished animation. so basically 2 steps:
planning, ideas, concepts, and sorting out generally what you’ll do, presented as a story board
final piece, in the specified formats
i think this will be important for 2 reasons, firstly it will stop people floundering around, changing ideas, getting discouraged etc, which is something i frequently do, and learning how to storyboard/plan, a bit of drawing practice etc, is always a good thing to have under your belt.
one other thing, while it wouldn’t be a rule, is to make clear that the animation doesn’t have to have perfect materials, lighting, or even be rendered, that the focus should stay on the actual animation, how well it portrays the story, etc.
and i had a quick look-see at the 10secondclub website, and i have to say, i’m not so sure about the whole animating to a fixed sound clip and in essence fixed timeline. while it does help with my earlier point of focussing on animation, it also really stifles (i feel) the creativity and flexibility. it makes for fairer judging etc, but it’s not like we’re competing for medals here 
but in that same vein, keeping the topic quite specific, for example; man jumping out of a window. that way you would be free to built up WHY he’s jumping out the window, but also a good yard stick for judging, how well does he land etc. also, the storyboarding will keep the whole process more logical, easy to follow, and give another way for judging to be fair, how well did he stick to the story board? how much did he have to “fudge” the animation to make it work?
well, that’s my 2cents.
actually, it was more like 36cents.
bah, you get the idea
yeah i think your right, the reason the 10 second club do what they do is that its about creating a real situation as an animator would be required to do in a company like pixar or disney. like the director assins you the shot and you have to create the performance no matter what it is. the good thing about it is that it forces animators to think about the acting rather than the tecnical side of things.
i definatly agree that the focus is purely on animation and that posting a story board or series of thumbs to explain where its going is a good idea, after all this forum is about the learning process and about people supporting each other and helping them out with a spot of direction when they need it.
the ideas thread is the place to put any ideas these can be about anything i just think that 15 seconds of animation in a month will be higher quality than people rushing to make an epic. some of the best creations in the world come from limits besides we have to have some coz it would just be a wip section is we didn’t.
anyway hope to see some cool ideas coming in.
Now I’m starting to agree with you on the 15 seconds thing, Dalmanna. There will definitely be some folks who try to outdo themselves, planning out something too long, and finally not finishing in time. That would suck in general to see a whole bunch of unfinished animations.
I say yes to the storyboard/thumbs idea. Don’t think showing all phases is necessary though (blocking/revision/etc.)
the storyboard is pretty essential as people can tell if it can be done in the time frame.
the other thing is that if people are finishing to a quality level the work can be used on a reel. so i won’t seem like time wasted.
i’ve been thinking, but can’t decide, how the tpoics should be handled. what you said makes extremely good sence, that sound clips are good in that they are related to what you might get handed in industry, but again so might scripts, storyboards etc, and also, if these challenges could potentially be used for showreels, which i think is a fabulous idea, then it also needs to be flexible enough that the animator get’s to express themselves through it and for it to be original… as far as i can tell, how the topics are given will be fundamental to both the success of this, and the usefulness to participants… sorry that i haven’t got any answers/suggestions, but it’s something that’s concerned me
EDIT: d’oh, i robably should have put all this in the idea’s thread. anyway, after reading around a bit, how’s about this: proposed ideas include the type,theme,storyboard, or soundclip, that way it’ll always be different, and the ‘people’ can choose what they’d rather do. styles could either be rotated, or perhaps a poll each month for the topic/style etc for the following month? maybe the previous months winner could choose as a reward?
i totally agree dangermouse, theres no rush to get this up and running, i wanna make sure that when we do it’s somthing that will benefit the animators doing it. i’m gonna spend some time today throwing around ideas of how to pull this off and then i’ll stick em up later to see what you guys think.
Dangermouse, Good idea to do a poll to decide the coming month’s theme.
I just hope more CGTalkers will start contributing to this thread! It’ll be kinda boring if there’s only 3 of us doing this every month!
i agree, we def need more people, but things take time, i’m commited to this, so a little patience will go a long way i’m sure.
one thing, would it be sensible do you think to open this up to 2d artists as well?i ask because i’ve got a 2d animator friend, apparently they can whack out a line test (sketchy kind of animation, but still clear and accurate) reasonably quickly. it would make judging and critiquing harder though. hmm, i think i’ve talked myself out of the idea already
anyway, back on topic, each month:
thread to vote for last months winner
1 thread per entry
thread to vote for next months topic (randomly pick a handful from the suggestions thread)
of course, just a suggestion, i’m holding out for dalmanna’s thoughts, he said he was gonna give it some serious thought. i really think this forum could be quite a major hub, i get the general feeling animations are a somewhat neglected area of cgsociety. plenty of animation threads, but very few threads containing actual animations.
anyway, it’s so damned late here i’m tired and rambling, so i’ll be back tomorow.
WAY off topic: i’m trying to come up with a good artists alias, i don’t like danger mouse, i’ve never had a nickname, and i’m stumped…
Why not Dangermousedanger? :applause:
But seriously, I agree this could be a success if we can get enough people to get involved. If we offer a variety of challenge types (animate to audio/theme/music) I think we could be more attractive than places that limit the contest to only dialogue.
I think it would be cool to limit it only to 3D artists. Obviously I have nothing against 2D artists, except that I just lost to one in the 10secondclub’s march contest. Argh. :argh:
Alright guys :wavey: Ive given this a bit of thought whilst working today this is what I came up with;
[color=silver]Animation in any medium as to be honest animation is animation doesnt matter how its done. It may seem like 2d has an advantage coz it quicker but no one really has an advantage in either medium because with 2d you have to make model sheets first and do character designs before any animation can take place and in 3d you can just use box rigs or a free one off the web. For example the low man rig of generi rig is fine.[/color]
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[color=silver]The animators choose the style. Basically only the subject each month is chosen for you. An example of this is; if the subject was to show a loss then it could be interpreted as someone who has lost their keys or someone who has lost a family member or something completely different, the choice would be yours. In terms of how it is carried out, the one with the person who has lost their keys could be animated to music whereas the one with the death of a family member could be a dialogue scene. Again its the animators discretion. [/color]
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[color=silver]Subjects wouldnt always be show a loss type stuff it could be like jump out a window (to use I believe danger mouses example.) it important that the story is the animators own its just the subject that has to be incorporated some how. This gives the animator a certain amount of freedom without have everyone doing as they please all willy nilly. It has to be graded around something [font=Wingdings]
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[color=silver]Finally the animation has a deadline of one month so if we say that every animation should be approximately 15 seconds long it will give people time to produce a quality animation and allow them to finish it on time (hopefully) important to note that 15 seconds is not a hard fast rule as in you will not get penalized for going over or being slightly bellow. The most important thing about these challenges is that people are given the chance to produce something at a high standard, which can either be used as just a practice or finished up with a pretty render to stick on a reel.[/color]
These are just a bunch of ideas their still up for discussion so feel free to add or fix anything. So most importantly what do you guys think. My main concern is that we all learn to be better animators so i’m open to anything that’ll help us do that.
Sounds good to me. Freedom is good. We could use this as a base for starting, and go tweaking the rules as we go.
I’m just anxious to start one! What do you say if we go ahead and post a new thread with a poll asking folks to vote on the contest that would start on 1 May? That would give us a month to get votes in and to ‘advertise’ the challenge around a bit.
Or am I a little too anxious? Maybe we should hammer things out more first?
also, I’m still voting for all 3D animation, no 2D…just so that the playing field is a little more level.
yeah 1st of may is cool, gives us some time to shout about it in the general disscusion thread.
as for only 3d thats cool if you wanna do it that way, i was just gonna chop and change and do a bit of both like one month 3d next one 2d just to stay in touch with both. though this could be my love of glen keanes work wanting to creep out.
cool. Whatever you decide is good with me. So let’s move over to the idea thread to get the ideas to present in the poll worked out?
This is cool…I didnt take advantage of it when it was last on…It’ll be nice to do this especial considerig I’ll have finnished uni by then…be a cool way of building up my reel…