24 Hours for 2019

That time of year again. 
Time for the 24 hours Animation Contest and challenge on Friday, Oct 4th to Saturday, Oct 5th!

In past years, I have posted all the 24 hours contests that Woodbury University has been involved with. Here are last year's teams and their films.

Enrollment has gone up with the increase of Animation students at Woodbury this year. Several classrooms have been updated, replacing Animation discs and desks with Work stations and Cintiqs. 

Here's a live stream from CSU Long Beach: https://www.facebook.com/aubry.mintz/videos/10162551963485551/?notif_id=1570226399742648&notif_t=live_video_explicit

This year's theme is: Family 

Family(noun) fam·i·ly |  \ ˈfam-lē    , ˈfa-mə-\ plural families

F amily  –  F amilia  -  家庭 –  F amiglia  –  ครอบคร ว –  Rodina  –  Ohana  –  החפש מ  –  परिवाि –  Keluarga  –

Pamilya  –  Famille  –  F amilie  –  Família  –  Οι κο γ έ νε ια  –  С емь я  –  Aiga  –  가족 –  ةل ئاع

“Holding  on  as  one

Roots  rich  with  stories  of  life

Ancestrally  linked”

-  Denise  Boston,  Ph.D.,  Dean of Diversity &  Inclusion,  California

Institute  of Integral  Studies

It's a family affair, it's a family affair One child grows up to be Somebody that just loves to learn And another child grows up to be Somebody you'd just love to burn Mom loves the both of them

You see it's in the blood

- Lyrics from the song “Family Affair” by Sylvester Stewart AKA Sly Stone

from Sly and the Family Stone

https://www.urbandictionary.com/ offers the following definitions of the word family:

family sample definition 1:

A group of people, usually of the same blood (but do not have to be), who genuinely love, trust, care about, and look out for each other. REAL family is a bondage that cannot be broken by any means.

by Lola5544 April 29, 2011

family sample definition 2:

A bunch of people who hate each other and eat dinner together. by Guinness 1759 September 16, 2005

In some families parents enjoy spending time with their children but in other families the parents may have to work three jobs to pay the bills and don’t have the privilege.

In some families siblings look out for and love one another – even older siblings generally help take care of younger siblings. In other families siblings must learn to fend for themselves and the strongest rise to the surface.

In some familes the children respect their parents born out of love and nurturing.

In other families the children are forced to respect their parents one way or another.

Some parents are in love

Some parents make it work for the children Some parents make it work in separate homes Some parents don’t make it work at all

Some children don’t have any parents at all.

Families can be seen as a bond that holds centuries of lineage in an interweaved web creating generations rich with culture

drastically paired with

families that struggle to hold on for life while they are separated at border walls in certain political climates

As you can see from the samples above the definition of Family casts a wide net from a collection of very personal stories that range from extremely supportive experiences that fosters stimulation and encouragement towards intellectual and artistic growth to the sheer opposite that displays families that promote harmful abusive patterns for generations to come.

THE THEME FOR 24 HOURS 2019 is:

What does “family” mean to you?

Make a 30-second animated film based on your own

definition of “family” .

You have 24 HOURS Go!...

 

This year, Woodbury has 3 teams competing in the 24 hour animation contest.

The SnickerDoodles

Brieanna Bell, Colby Yabeny, Amanda Wiley, Brandon Chua and Janine Zarmarron

Finished film goes here.

HADLY

In the back row; Yifan Zhang, Lauren Gregorio,Heather Ramos, Aspen Leavitt and Daniel Cruz

and

The PaintBucketeers

Guenevere Smith, Mallory Collins, Taylor Pedersen, Nicole Petrovsky and Haley Lambert

Woodbury entered the first 24 hours contest back in 2014 with only 2 teams.

After the 24 Hours were over, 2 projects came out of Woodbury and one of them won first place. It was a real boost to the Seniors who had worked together and were able to make an animated short which tested all their learning over the past four years.

Last year's theme: What if you had 24 hours to live?  
Ryan Tengel and her Woodbury University animation team answered the question with this 1st place winning short.

The team members from this short film are now currently working in animation at Cartoon Network, DreamWorks and other animation studios.

At this time, we still have no idea if Team Snickerdoodles survived or not? We are waiting to hear back from them and post their film as well. If you have seen them wandering the halls or stairways, approach with caution; they have been up for 24 hours and need a hug.

Personality Walk

Here's the challenge

Your character enters the scene in an emotional state that your audience will understand, showing who the character is or how they are feeling at the time?

Once you've figured that one out, try having something in the scene before the character enters. Let your audience see it before the character, and when he/she does arrive, show how they react to the thing in the middle of the room. It can be big thing or a small one, living or inanimate.

The ending to this scene is how will your character get around the "thing"? This is the assignment that you need to think about, storyboard some key poses and figure how a simple approach to this situation.

 

There are a lot of great examples of how to animate different walks in the Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams. Study his Key poses and breakdowns to apply those to your character. Here's a link to the book. 

After getting this assignment, I usually see a group of people silently thinking about what to do next. Its a lot to take in at first, especially if you have never done something like this before. The best place to start is to think about a character in this situation and what is the "thing" that is blocking his path? The thing can be something small like a live mouse or a wallet full of money. How does the character react to this? This is how to character acts and reacts to it.

This scene doesn't have to have a joke at the end or a punchline. Just try to animate a character to show your audience a character personality they might know.

Wants it, Curious about it or doesn't want it all

Rough out some storyboard ideas to show the "thing" in the scene to set up the situation, the character enters showing us what type of person he is. Is he a sad begger, shuffling in or is he a proud upright wealthy person? Whatever the "thing" is, the character must either want it, find it interesting or doesn't want anything to do with it. This is in their reaction to the "thing" and you must let the audience see how they feel about it.

Students tend to fly by this part which is the heart of the scene. Instead, they do a wild take and then have the character jump over the object. They don't give enough time to the character's reaction which isn't just in the face, but the body is the driving force and the face is the secondary part. Watch this Flour sack animation, there is no face, but you know how he is reacting to different situations by his body language and attitude. 

Flour Sack Animation test from Ron Zorman on Vimeo.

I often ask students to think about their scene more, perhaps even act it out themselves in front of a mirror or video camera. This saves a lot of drawing sometimes.

Here's a great amount of animated walks and runs from Disney's "Robin Hood". You want to turn down the sound to study the animation. But here you can see attitude's in motion during their walk or run.

 

 

15000 Views!

Thank You for the 15,000 all time views!

Animateducated has just hit its 15,000 views and we want to thank everyone for taking the time to visit this blog. We are still in the process of improving the content and welcome other animators or educators to add their animation articles of interest. 

To celebrate this occasion, we'd like to hear from you, the viewer. What do you like about this blog? Anything you would like to see in future blog posts? Any comments are welcomed below.

Future Interviews in the works 

Back in February, we did a post on Caroline Leaf, http://animateducated.blogspot.com/2016/02/animation-on-glass.html and recently she contacted us to let us know what she is doing to these days.

Back in May, I contacted Andreas Deja, http://animateducated.blogspot.com/2016/05/your-questions-to-andreas-deja.html who is working on his film "Mushka" and has his own blog, Deja View. I have collected only about 4831 questions so far, just a few more to go before we can do the interview.

Do you have any animation interviews or animation people you would like to learn more about. Perhaps we can organize an animation safari and track down an exclusive interview together? Send us your comments, suggestions, thoughts, anything is welcomed and appreciated.

Thank you to the 100 viewers from Japan who visited recently!

Thanks for the 15000, see you at 20,000!
J.Richardson
heyjimr@gmail.com  

Happy Father's Day!

 

 

Happy 9000 viewers!

What a way to end 2015 as this blog has just hit 9000 views! 

Did this really happen or are these views merely generated by silent robots that collect information about animation production? Hopefully, the humans who like this blog will leave a comment as proof there are lifeforms reading this blog after all. If too shy to type, perhaps clicking on an ad to the right will give us a little support now and then.

Again, I really appreciate the views and hope to bring some the articles in the new year. If you have anything animated to share, please let me know! Happy 2016 to all!

Thanks the everyone this week in US, Israel, Canada, France, Colombia, Philippines, UK, Russia, Czech Republic and Indonesia!