24 Hours has begun again!

Yes, it's true, the 24 Hours Animation Contest has begun! This is the 3rd year, Woodbury University will be competing in this event with 5 teams ready and willing to animate a 30 second short in 24 hours or less.Here's a link to last year's entries and winners!

The Woodbury Animation teams are as follows;

 Drew's Clues

Nicki Williams, Emily Fletcher, Andrew Arcilla, Ashley White and Jada Kurian

 
Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies 

Top: Kane Boyer, Rafik Vardanyan

Bottom: Denise Caro, Hannah Garcia, Lindsey Uslan

 Something Epic

Brandon Swofford, Jackie Godin ,Waverly Alonso, Haley Weed and Catherine Broyles

 The Night Owls

(Seth) Yongkang Wu, Angellica Cress, Alfredo Verjan, Thomas Reddick, and Hector Almendares

Ctrl+Z

 

Anna Sher, Swan Oh, Dota Sata, Cynthia Nava and Jane Remizova 

The event began at 4pm on Friday, Oct 2nd with Aubry Mintz of CSULB welcoming all the 106 teams (530 students) from 22 schools in California,South Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and my home state of Florida; as well as two countries, Canada and Australia in this year's contest.

He also thanked all the sponsors which include: CTN Animation Expo, DigiCel Flipbook, Focal Press, CSU's Summer Arts, Stuart Ng Books and Wacom. As well as ASIFA Hollywood and Animation Studios; Blue Sky, Dreamworks, Film Roman and Laika!

And then, the Theme to this year's 24Hours Animation Contest was announced!

Imagine if technology was introduced at the dawn of human kind.

30 second films can be in Past, present, future. 

Questions to consider:
What is the technology people found? How did people react to the technology? How did people evolve with this technology? What would today would look like?

Once the teams understood the theme, they began to brainstorm ideas to come up with a 30 second animation based on that theme.

And soon those ideas were formed into a rough storyboard timed out to fit into the 30 second format. Some teams were doing this process with their Cintiqs, while others used pencils,paper, scanners to input their drawings into the computer.

After a Pizza gathering at 9pm, the teams quickly returned to their projects ready for a long and productive night. 

This year, Drew's Clues and Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies were the freshmen teams who are both working tradigitally by animating on paper, scanning the drawings and finish animating in the computer. 

This was the first year a Stop Motion production was created and as the hours went from PM to early AM, the teams kept working. Some took turns sleeping as their team mates kept working. Some students stayed up all night without a break and soon wished they had when the sun began to rise. 

And as the morning grew brighter, several dozen donuts arrived for breakfast which were quickly consumed by the sleepless animation zombies. And as soon as they ate, back they went to their computer monitors to continue the work the had begun yesterday.

Occasionally after 3pm, you could hear a loud cheer as projects had been completed and downloaded to their youtube channel. The Night Owls were a mixture of 2 Freshman, 1 Sophomore and 2 Seniors, and the first to finish and submit their project.

Ctrl+Z is our Senior Team who were the second team to submit their entry...

Something Epic from our Sophomore team...

Drew's Clues got their submission in at the last possible second, unfortunately they submitted without their soundtrack, but here it is with sound.

The Fire Breathing Rubber Ducks were the only team not able to finish their production before the deadline. Although, they did learn a lot from this experience, I hope to post their project soon.

All in all, everyone had a great time and did a lot of work in a short amount of time. I am proud of everyone who stepped up and made it happen. If you have any comments or suggestions for any of the teams, please let a comment below. 

Get a good night's sleep...

NEXT: 24 Hours Animation Contest Winners for 2015!