And the 2017 24 Hours begins...

In past month, students have been preparing for this year's 24 Hours Animation Contest and have formed into teams. Each team has 5 students, some team members have been through the process before, while others are doing this for the first. Everyone is up for the challenge.

Each year this contest increases in size due to its popularity. Last year's contest in 2016 there were 27 schools participating and 124 teams or 620 students in competition. This year, there are 44 schools schools participating with 183 Teams completing or 915 students all working to complete a :30 second animated film based on the theme in 24 hours.

 

The 2017 Woodbury University 24 Hours animation teams gathered in the Design Center's D105 at 3pm. Great hordes of excited Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors gathered as timid,but curious Freshman stayed to watch. The live streaming announcement came from Aubry Mintz in his top secret classroom, hidden somewhere in Long Beach, CA.

The goal of the 24 hours contest is to create a 30 second animation piece from a theme which is announced at the beginning by 24 Hours. Aubry Mintz, Associate Professor at CSULB welcomes all the school's participating, thanks the sponsors who have donated prizes to the final top five winners and finally announces the theme of this year's 24 Hours contest.

This year's theme was announced by Mintz on Friday, Oct 6th at 3:30pm PST and is as follows.

The 24 HOURS 2017 THEME:

Is based on the Sesame Street song, " One of these things is not like the others."

Let the Brain Storming begin! 
And off they go in a wild giggle of animation students to find an area to work. Some are on Macs, others are on PCs and a few have taken over the Stop Motion studio. Snacks appear along with laptops, pencils and pens. Dry erase boards are suddenly filling up with thumbnail sketches, words, images and ideas are starting to be born.

 

 

 

The Creative process is alive tonight and everyone is working on turning this year's theme into their own unique vision. There are a variety of animation projects being produced from Traditional, to Digital and even stop motion.

Team Deception from Toondini on Vimeo.

But with great brain power comes food for thought. At around 9pm, Several pizzas were delivered. 

 

All the students took a quick dinner break and returned to a long night of animation ahead.

And into the night they work.

Next Post: The final WU films

Animation Visual Development 1

Visual Development: Is a way to explore and figure out the look and style of your final film before beginning the animation process. Visual Development isn't just the background images, but the characters, the props, ways of moving a character or object, the environment and the world that the story takes place in.

Here are a few early VisDev designs for Disney Pixar's "UP". Here are a bunch of simple head designs of an old man... An idea of the House in a different location by Lou Romano.

Another Lou Romano design, Its night and the two characters are talking about what is shown on the right of the image. Your eyes start in the middle, drift to the left to see the horse and night sky in the window and then over to see the house on the mountain with a waterfall.

What starts off as simple concepts and drawings, eventually becomes more visually defined.

As the storyboard is locked and the Animatic is being assembled, Visual Development begins about the same time the storyboard is being created and Character Designs are coming together. Visual Development keeps on going through the rough animation process to figure out how the rough props or environments will look. The Director is the one who is approving what the visual look will finally be.

Your visual development must be explored to make it as interesting to look at as possible and which fits the story in general. 

Here are character designs from "Inside Out" by Chris Sasaki. See how the character designs for Disgust evolves into her final look.

From a Cartoony look...

to a little more realistic...

 A combination of both...

 After all the revisions, redesigning and tweaking, we finally get to our final design!

 

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