Festival submissions Cont.

Animation Block Party - Animation block party claims to be the "premiere" animation festival on the East coast. It is a festival dedicated to animation and they accept independent, student, and professional animations. I think it would be great to get my film into this festival because A) it is cheap, B) it would be a great networking opportunity, especially because I want to stay on the East coast. The late deadline is June 2nd so I could still get into this years, but I am not sure if I want to.

Dam Short Film Festival - Dam Short Film Festival is located in Boulder City, Nevada. I wanted to get a festival outside of the East coast region, plus this one focuses on short films. All submissions have to be under 40 minutes and since mine is under 2 minutes I think shorts blocks are the way to go. The festival isn't until February 2015 so I still have plenty of time to submit.

Love your Shorts - Love Your Shorts is another shorts festival. This one is located in Florida so It would not be unheard of to travel to the festival. These guys only accept films 30 minutes or less which is good. having looked at their previous animation selections, it looks like they pick a variety of mediums for their selection and some of their picks for 2d seem to be about the same quality as my film.

Asheville Cinema Fest - Asheville Cinema Fest is a selection primarily to spread my work around North Carolina. I'd prefer to stay in-state for a little while after school so any publicity I can get here is beneficial. They don't look like they're super focused on animation but their fee is only $25 which isn't too expensive although if push comes to shove this will be one of the first festivals to go.

Utopia Film Festival - "The Utopia Film Festival searches for and presents films that explore utopian visions in a multitude of forms: cultural, social, political, and environmental to name but a few. From its inception, Utopia has sought quality independent films which reflect the utopian spirit of better living through film: works that entertain, enlighten, and address such themes as community building, cultural diversity, social and economic concerns, and environmental issues. The Utopia Film Festival is also a dedicated supporter of locally produced films and films that focus on local subjects. In addition to these two primary thematic programs, the festival also has several other specialty programs that include experimental films, animated films for the young, and films to celebrate the Halloween season. " Although this festival is primarily about utopian visions I think my film has a strong chance to get into the animated films for kids section. I think the theme/message of my films is one of personal inspiration that might go well with kids.

Savannah Film Festival - although this festival was not on my graph thing, it is one I am strongly considering submitting to. They have a policy that animations are allowed to have the entry fee waived if entered by April 1st, obviously I missed that this year but I can submit next year for that one. If they are that welcoming to animations I feel as though its a good place to submit too. It's fairly close to home so I could travel to it potentially. I also heard great things about it from some of the Visions guests.

Cucalorus - Cucalorus is a given. Since It is hosted right here in Wilmington it would be a great way to network and potentially be able to stay in town for awhile. after seeing some of the animations last year I feel like mine could be snuck in there somewhere especially with its shorter run time.

Non-TBL thingy

So there's a quote or a speech or something that I've been trying to find since the beginning of this class that kinda helps me along when I hit a bit of a wall on my work. Out of luck I found an awesome typography of it this morning so here it is:

https://vimeo.com/24715531

I feel like this is good advice to hear early on in your career.

Bob Hawke

Seeing that you have worked with several different film festivals, do you have to take a moment to get into the mindset of that specific festival?

For instance, have you seen a film that you know is well-made but have to vote against it due to the personality of the festival you're jurying for?

Having worked with so many people from early on in their careers, have you ever seen someone take that jump to the next level, say from a student film to a professional level?  What would you say is the most deciding factor in that process?

How does being on both sides of the festival world, both producer and jury member affect your work?
Do you have a particular side you prefer to work on?

Festival Plan

Festival Name	Submission Date	Deadline	Fee	Category	Submission Format	Location	Date of Event
Animation Block Party	May 2nd/June 2nd	Reg./Late	$25-35/$30-40	Animation	Secure online screener/DVD	Brooklyn, NY	July 24 – 27
Dam Short Film Festival	June 15th/Sep 24th	Early/Reg.	$30/$35	Animation	Secure online screener/DVD	Boulder City,NV	Feb. 4 – 7,  2015
Love Your Shorts	June 30th/Sep 15th	Early/Reg.	$20/$25	Animation	Secure online screener/DVD	Sanford, FL	Feb. 12 -15, 2015
Asheville Cinema Festival	June 15th/July 16th	Reg./Late	$35/$40	Animation	Secure online Screener	Asheville, NC	Nov 7 – 11
Utopia Film Festival	May 28th/June 18th	Reg./Late	$35/$40	Animation	DVD	Greenbelt, MD	Oct 24 - 26
Pentaloma
Next frame

Seattle Shorts
Athens Film Fest
Twin Rivers
Praxis
IVY
24 FPS International Film Fest

Here's my current festival plan. I've looked through the past submissions and some of the festivals I have picked typically chose quite a few animations. I decided to mainly submit to shorts festivals because otherwise I don't think my piece stands much of a chance against longer films especially due to its schizophrenic nature. I will definitely be adding to this as time progresses. One festival I would have liked to submit to was the savannah international film fest. They want animations pretty bad so if you submitted by April 1st it was free. Unfortunately I need to finish my film first so I'm probably not gonna submit to them.

Progress!

Things are finally coming together! I’ve started putting all of the vector and Flash images together in After Effects finally and it looks awesome. I changed the design of the car to something that I think looks better in a minimalistic sense. It is based off of an Aston Martin DB5, which is pretty much my favorite car ever. Its colors match the jet better instead of going from straight grey to bright blue. It’s really satisfying to see things start to come together since I felt like the Flash animation was taking far too long with little reward. I’m going to post a video of the rough stuff later and then I’ll post another one before my image check next week. It’s an ambitious goal but I’d like to have 75% of my stuff put together by then. I imagine the t-rex walk will take the longest and I’ll probably leave that as the last bit of primary animation. I want it to look good and I don’t wanna rush it so I’d like to be able to dedicate about 2 or 3 days to it to get everything right. I’m still in contact with professor Markowski and I’m hoping to meet with him later this week to discuss details. At this point I’m thinking I’m gonna scrap the music overlay idea or at least make it a faint instrumental track to focus on little details. I’m still looking into marketing ideas at this point. I’m thinking that while I would love to submit to animation-only festivals, broader festivals would be a good idea too. Going off of the logic that we used for visions, the animations are typically shorter than everything else and light hearted so we didn’t have to be as tight about what we kept. Whereas if I submitted to a pure animation festival, while there may be a lot more opportunities to network and get my stuff out there, I believe it will be much harder to get in. My work would likely get scrutinized against other animations in terms of the quality of the animation and other factors to a much greater degree. Any way these are just my thoughts on the assignment at this point.

Good News!

I feel like lots of my recent posts have been about things going wrong on my project, Well not this time! As per Shannon's suggestion, I emailed Professor Markowski about doing sound design for my project. He responded by saying that yes he would love to help and tat it sounds fun and as long as it doesn't take too much of his time he ay do it for free! After so many setbacks this is awesome! Also, most of my flash animation is now in its rough draft state. I'm going to go through and polish everything up for class tomorrow so everyone can see how some of the final animation is supposed to look. There are only a few scenes I want to do purely in flash that aren't complete, these are the t rex running across the screen and the surfing bit. I have decided to remove the scuba diving bit as I though it screwed up the pacing quite a lot. Instead I'm gonna have the guy eject out of his sub and shoot out of the water and land on his surfboard.I know it seems a little b-movie ish but that's why I want it. I'm gonna turn the ridiculousness knob all the way to 11. In terms of the surfing i have about a second of it done but it, like the t rex is a lot harder than I originally thought. It's getting there but It won't be ready for class tomorrow which is kind of a bummer, but focus on the positives!

Post-image Check 1

So I think things are going decently at the moment. I was thinking that I was super behind for the past week or two but I may have been over-exaggerating. I came to the realization the other day that it is not necessarily that I haven't done the Flash animation I said I would, I mean I am a little behind on some of that but I have also switched a lot of what I originally thought I would be doing in After effects in Flash. Some scenes (the car, the plane, the mechanical bull, the minisub, the stampede, and the pennyfarthing) will be done in After effects but basically anything that involves a lot of movement from the guy I'm gonna do in Flash. I've never really liked how vector animation looks because unless you're really careful with your key frames it looks stiff. You also can't easily manipulate in 3D, like body rotation and stuff like that. So my baseline goal for next week is to have the mountain climbing scene finished (probably @ 75% right now) and the T-rex bit of the mechanical bull scene. Funnily enough there is actually a hell of a lot more reference material for a T-rex than there is of a person mountain climbing. That being said, I want to have more than this done and likely will. I still need to do surfing and scuba diving which ideally I would have done. Then I will move onto the vector animation for the vehicles. the typography aspect is gonna keep me satisfied in terms of the original design of the project. I wanted to do a motion design project and instead it has more or less turned into a Flash animation but If I can play around with the typography aspect I'll be okay with deviating so much. Looking at it glass half full, it just adds more variety to my animation for a challenge and also for future employers. The main thing I am concerned about is blending the two styles. I'll have to make some changes to where I was gonna put some of the text or something. The main thing I was thinking about earlier was the flag specifically. I can't flash animate that and put text on top because it'll be super obvious it's just a layer on top of another. A thought I had was to find a cloth animation in after effects and use that, that way I can probably use the same settings/formula for the text layer to make it deform the same way. Unfortunately this is something I would need the edit lab for because my computer would probably burst into flames if I try to render it at home.

Animation underway!

I'm so excited to finally be animating. The pre-production stages were tedious but presenting the animatic in class was a great feeling. It was awesome to see everything come together like that and I can't wait to see how everything comes together towards the end of the semester. Like any shcedule, there are somethings that have changed since I made my schedule. I negated to consider Spring Break into my plans and as such am behind where I would like to be. I think getting all of the hand-drawn animation done in two weeks was a bold goal and it was too bold as it turns out. I've got some stuff done but not nearly as much as I had wanted. My main reasoning for the timing was to hit each of the image checks with a lot of stuff to show. I do however have a crafty plan. I still want a majority of the animation done by the 2nd image check but if I hire a sound designer like Shannon suggested, that will free up and extra week and a half or so for more animating. I'm kinda bummed I won't have some solid things but the run cycle is a rough draft right now,  and the jet pack bit should be ready too. Ideally I'd like to have the rock climbing, swimming, and skydiving bits done too but we'll see about that. I'm not worried about the project as a whole, once I get into a solid routine things should get done nicely.

Animatic

Here's the link to my animatic with rough sound. I've already noticed a a couple of problems with it but I can deal with that later.

Problems

- Pacing with dinosaur
- Forgot Tattoo scene
- race pacing
- there's probably some more but I'm having a brain fart, I'll update later

https://vimeo.com/87648609

 As a result of my last discovery, I am thinking about moving my schedule round and start with the Flash animation. I think it will be easier to adapt the After Effects images to the Flash rather than the other way round.

Another Snag

While making my animatic I have found another super fun problem. My plan was to originally composite flash into after effects, or vice versa. However, although you can bring photoshop and illustrator files into AE, Flash and AE are not compatible in the same way. I can still use the two programs and I can put the flash into After effects but the flash file has to be exported first. This is going to complicate things as I cannot make small changes quickly because I'll have to do them and then export the file and drop it into AE. not only is this going to be time consuming, it is also really annoying. As a result I may end up doing more of this in flash than I had originally planned. Fortunately I left about 1 1/2 weeks after I wanted to have the main animations done for corrections so I can use that time to properly fine tune the final product. I have also learned that my computer is not able to render my files well so I'll have to work around the edit lab times to export over there. Despite these problems I will have the animatic up on vimeo by tomorrow night, or before class on wed. at the very latest.

New artwork!

I've got some new artwork I've been working on. Unfortunately I've hit a bit of a snag. Like I've been posting for the past few weeks I cannot get my things to look the way I want them too and its driving me bonkers. I've got a plane and a mechanical bull but they still don't look exactly how I want, I've been trying to get that grain effect I posted the other day but it just isn't working.

These are close to want I want in terms of a minimalistic style but they're missing that texture I really want.

Bingo!

After weeks of searching it is so satisfying to find almost exactly what I've been looking for. I found this tutorial this morning, http://vectips.com/tutorials/create-grainy-textures/. It covers the style I've been trying to figure out how to do almost perfectly! I've been messing around with something similar recently but it didn't look exactly right. Unfortunately I'm a little behind where I wanted to be at this point but that's why I planned extra animation time at the towards the end of my schedule. Now that I know how to make my images look the way I want it should be easier to get them done! I plan to have a few stills done by class tomorrow.

Getting Closer

I'm very happy to say that I'm getting pretty close to nailing the visual style I've been trying to get for a while now, keep in mind this is still a little rough but here is an example:

I'm gonna mess around with it some more to get exactly what I want

Storyboard

Rough Budget?

The Bucket List Budget

Director/Animator: James Hardman-Cobb                                                                            Prep: 3 1/2 weeks

Location: FST edit lab                                                                                                                         Animate:  8 weeks

Budget date 2/2/2014                                                                                                                    Post: 1 ½ - 2 weeks

                                                                                                                                                                TOTAL: 13 weeks

PRE_PRODUCTION
Adobe Creative Cloud		$200/ year
USB Tablet		$110
PRODUCTION
Animator salary		$32.00/ hour
POST
Music rights		$100
Festival passes		$250
Adobe Plugins		$50