Bruce Del Porte

Gee Robert, once again you are hijacking someone else's project and shouting down anyone's but your own voice. Too bad in your haste to offer a snarky response, you didn't bother to actually read my post. I didn't say it was too complex for the animators. I suggested that Ilidrake could make it easier on himself by having the animators post their own work and that voting by email could relieve Jason or anyone else having to manage the video files and voting sequence. I don't consider the last contest as a failure. Three or four entries is about par for animation contests dating back to the Mini-Movie contests. A full week to animate isn't going to produce a major production, nor will it lengthen the contest time. Let me close Robert by saying that I offered my suggestions in good faith. I suppose forums like this eventually become dominated by the most shrill voices until the trolls find they are only talking to themselves. You managed to drive me out of RW after I made similar good faith suggestions. You have since edited your post, I would have been embarrassed too. You got it 100% your way and you got squat!

Why make it so complex for so little animation? Why not give the animators the full week. Like the last contest, those that have the time and the inspiration can do their best in the allotted time. Those with constraints, can do what they can. Even assuming a half hour to shaded render and post, how many seconds of animation can get accomplished in four hours? Everything will look like we are doing raw dailies. Why not give the animators the chance to do their best. Let the animators post their own work in an entry thread up to the announced end time and date. Voting can start as soon as entry is closed. Those that post early don't gain an advantage because the voting hasn't started and the animation won't get any better once it is posted. If you are creating a new e-mail account, why not vote by e-mail, one vote per person (e-mail account). Votes that look like ballot stuffing can be DQed, Ilidrake's decision is final. The contest would proceed something like: 1. Ilidrake gives the go, the duration would be one week from his posting's time/date stamp. 2. Animators post their entries in a "Entries" thread up to the time limit 3. Ilidrake calls time and posts the voting e-mail address. Voting begins 4. Ilidrake calls time to end the voting and announces the winners once he has tabulated the results. The advantage of simplicity is that no additional people are in the critical path to get the animators work posted and set up for voting. There are minimal chances of the contest stalling because someone in the critical path has conflicting priorities. Allowing animators the full week increases the chances of a a surprise gem or two.

Nice model. I don't know of way to make a spline a light source. I've made neon signs by 1. Use the font wizard to make the signage. 2. make it the neon color you want using Surface, 3. boost the ambient intensity to near 100% 4. turn glow on, adjust as appropriate You can animate all the surface attributes to get flicker and turn the sign on and off. Glow does not transmit light so you will have to add a colored light if you want it to illuminate other models.

Looks like a fun bunch of hiking companions. Beautiful composites! Nice series.

I was one of those that got caught unable to enter because of being in the middle of another project. I thought the contest was well run and got some good results. Bravo to the winners! I always enjoyed the Mini-Movie contests, if these become semi-regular, I'll save a slot to enter.

Both your first and second movies are really fun! kepp up the good work. Bruce

Great first animation. A 3+ minute video is very ambitious for a first project, I'm impressed by your perserverance. Keep at it and you will learn something new every day. Well done!

Life imitates art! Facebook and Google used for spying, who could have guessed.

Congrats to the David and his team, well done. I enjoyed all of the pieces, ARG!

Your big break, could it get any better? Big Time! And we knew you back when. I couldn't be happier for you, congratulations Gene! Bruce PS Get an agent

Congrats! It is a great video. Are they raking in the CD sales?

Well done! All the demos look great.

The buzz from last night's season premiere seems to be excellent. Edna Mode said something like "luck favors the prepared". With your new funding in place, you have put yourself in the perfect position for a huge success. Bravo! Now if only you could get Bill Gaines to come back from the dead to do your story boards. Good luck

Boo Hoo! Robert, you have nothing but your own poor leadership to blame for the 2011 project derailing. I suspect even Alfred Hitchcock would have been replaced had he allowed a 90 day schedule (Your rule 13) to slip to fourteen months, with no end in sight. In May, when you moved the end date to September, you were still soliciting new recruits rather that looking to wrap things up. Even at the end of November 2012, nearly eight months past the 90 day schedule, you were soliciting new participants. In May it became clear to me that there was no plan to finish and so I stepped to finish off my own work myself. If you consider it thoughtless, let me assure you it was well thought out because you weren't making anything happen. You still aren't. It is unfortunate that those folks that bought in to your leading this project to completion are now still in limbo while you have a pity party because of your "deflated interest". My sympathy is for them being duped, not your bruised ego. I am proud I was able to recycle my own work from your failed project and make a complete piece. Hitchcock's movie was an interesting study. If at some point you decide to quit pouting and complete your compilation, I'm sure the two pieces will compliment each other.

Disney pays very well. When the motivation for those that "agree to disagree" becomes just reaching the end, you create an unstable organizational problem. Resentment becomes accumulative. You've made my point. I have a lot of admiration those that persevered and finished the two Oz movies. I think the results are remarkable. I am disappointed though at the number of people that moved to the sideline or left altogether. Cenrtainly Hash as a company and the forum as a community paid a heavy price of disillusionment. Returning to my original point, I am proposing that more of the creative control be left to the individuals or groups that choose to contribute to a group project. I think we can have a coherent theme in a compilation piece while having a wide latitude in content and work flow.

Hear hear! Thank goodness for Martin's vision on that.

A single vision collaboration is an oxymoron. Artists that sacrifice their individuality become technicians. On commercial feature films, the animators ( or really any of the CG crafts) are paid as technicians to execute the producer's/director's vision. This is fine as long as one is honest with one's self about their motivation.

I am certainly one of those who bailed out during TWO however I would say it was much more than "unmet expectations". What I found was that I was turning a hobby into a job. It didnt take much soul searching to realize working on a story i didn't believe in using a work flow that I found dubious was an artistically numbing. The two movies were very ambitious and I applaud those who stuck it out and finished. To keep it an enjoyable hobby for me and to keep the work interesting over the long iterative process of completing a sequence or whole piece, I needed to be able to find "the vision/joke" as fresh the hundredth or even the thousandth time I watched the WIP as it was at the onset. I learned I am content to complete a piece and be the only one on earth that gets the joke while living with my own technical flaws rather than dred every hour of work on something I don't find artistically interesting. I started using AM with version 8.5, during the era of "the list". Back in those olden days, the "one man, one computer" ethos was perfect for a hobbiest. The animation and still contests had a general theme but gave a wide latitude to each entrant to set their own vision and use their own work flow. The two Oz movies, I guess somewhat out of practical necessity, recalibrated away from OMOC to having a lot of people doing work that was not their own vision. It seems to me that much of this new thinking has carried over to subsequent forum projects and many of the modern projects try to dictate both a narrow artistic vision and work flow. Even with much more powerful software and computers, these projects seem to be yielding fewer and fewer complete pieces. So what is an old school OMOC person to do? For themes I find interesting, I define my own project. Rules I find artistically dubious or work flow elements I find to be productivity killers I descope. I would much rather finish my own vision than abandon a half finished attempt at someone else's. My hard drive has plenty half finished projects, abandoned out of losing my inspiration. So what is my point here, I guess I'm suggesting we recapture some of the old OMOC ethos and define forum projects that allow the contributors to create work to their own vision, using their own work flow.

Nice character, nice soliloquy. I haven't seen the show you are parodying, but I love Mad Magazine type spoofs. Nice job.

Hey Simon, Animation has been produced as composites almost from its invention. There are a lot of both artistic and production productivity advantages. If you have Final Cut Pro, or any other NLE for that matter, building your scenes as composites is well worth learning. The biggest advantages I have found are 1. It cuts iterative render time way down because you don't rerender models that have not changed between versions 2. It simplifies lighting, allowing you to light actors and their surroundings separately without lights from one interfering with the other. 3. You can also use different focal lengths for the actor than the background. 4. You can adjust lightness and contrast of layers in FCP separately 5. A lot of times you can render just one frame of a static background, a huge render time saver You will need to learn to make separate shadow passes, and how to manage camera moves but both will become easy with just a little practice. A couple of tips for best results: 1. You will probably want to render to TGA sequences. PNG sequences or Animation .mov files work ok but I have had the best luck with TGAs 2. Change the camera background color to black and as you load the the sequence into FCP, set the alpha channel description as "premultiplied" with black. Every scene in Rear Window LHOOQ is a composite, assembled in a NLE. Compositing was a huge productivity boost. In the scenes you are doing for Why?, you could easily separate the characters from the background and each time you tweak, only render out the models that you changed. It is well worth learning.

Of course I couldn't leave well enough alone. Colorado Springs host an international film festival each summer and have a category for local film makers. I took a flyer and have entered this as a short. Based on some feedback, I added a short scene and tightened up the ending but still basically the same movie. I'll have most of the spring to give it another scrub. This is my submission tweak. [vimeo]59510498[/vimeo]

We are creatures of habit. I make sure I am up early enough to shower and make coffee before I leave in the morning and I admit I too expect to watch some TV at night as I wind down before bed. Making a habit of an hour a day to animate is plenty. The advantage of a larger, multi scene, project is that you can work out of order. Some scenes require lip syncing, some a walk, some creating a new model. You can work on what inspires you for your hour. The computer can render on its own while you sleep. It sounds like you need to find a project that inspires you. I don't know that I could animate for the sake of animating. Even if you pick something really stupid, if it cracks you up every time you look at it, the effort will have been worth it. Forget about measuring your work againt Pixar. Even if others are rolling their eyes and you are still giggling, it will be worth it. Every artist goes through periods were they don't have a masterpiece idea to work on, don't sweat it, one will come along.

Profound questions! I animate as a hobby and I think TheSpleen's credo "...I animate and design to make myself laugh..." is spot on. For a multi minute short you will watch it hundreds if not thousands of times and the idea you are animating needs to stand up if not improve as you go along. The large number of abandoned projects on my hard drive are mostly ones were the joke or idea lost its amusement value to me. A lot of times it is when I try to make a topical point and the moment passes before can come close to finishing. I would love to know TheSpleen's key to productivity for producing 5 to 6 minutes a month. That would be a game changer for me. The Rear Window short I just did took fifteen months to produce. The piece is six and a half minutes long. Even without adding another key, I'm not sure I could render it straight through in a month. Gene, do tell! From a production software standpoint, after Animation Master, a good nonlinear editor (NLE) is your most important tool. I use Vegas Pro but there are a number of good ones out there. I start by roughing out the short using story boards if you have them or because I don't draw very well I make crude place holder stills of scenes with the actors in the T position. I also rough out the sound design. Dialog and the music you chose often dictates scene length. Render it out to a video and once it starts to make sense, I start animating. As I go along, I substitute rendered animation for the place holders and build the movie from there. Once again I have to agree with TheSpleen, constant rendering keeps the momentum going. I try and add some animation every day and render the entire sequence over night. Once positioned in the NLE version of the movie, the sequence updates automatically. I try and render the NLE video out daily to get an idea how it is all coming together in the big picture. Lastly, you will get ideas for improvements as you go along. If they can be added without interrupting the production pace you are setting, embrace the new ideas. If it means you will likely lose momentum, save the idea for your next project. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Good luck!

I don't remember V11.1 but with later versions you can yield more machine cycles by minimizing the AM window while you render. You save a couple of seconds per frame with the minimized window if you leave it alone. It might even be because the cartoon stops running, no way to know. These savings are small compared to the render time improvements you get by upgrading to a newer version.

Fierce looking model, well done!