Tuesday, September 30, 2014

24hr Animated Film: Well Fed by Sentai Snails

Above is the Sentai Snail's entry for the 24 hour film competition! The Sentai Snails, aka: Eggy, Erika, Jon and Christian, and me!

The contest details:
Make a 30 second short film in 24 hours with a team of 5 people. We are not allowed help from teachers, or are able to use pre-existing characters. The entries will be themed so as to prevent anyone from prepping ahead of time. There were 52 groups participating from USA, Canada and Australia! There were prizes from Dreamworks, Disney, CTNX, and Wacom to name a few.

Unfortunately, we didn't place.. but no harm done! It was a really great learning experience for everyone involved. We had some great laughs (some freak-outs too) and are proud of our silly chickens! 

To be honest, our team was not a close knit bunch to begin with. It actually formed very randomly and I only just met two of our teammates just a couple of weeks before. To top that, we almost did not even get a chance to participate due to the limited number of Cintiqs in our studio! We managed to scrape in with some persistent emailing on my part.. 

On the day of the competition all the participating groups gathered in Nancy's classroom (our storyboard teacher who organized it all). We all waited to hear what the theme was to be via a live stream on YouTube. When we found out what it was, a lot of us were concerned:

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - George Orwell

Such a difficult theme! We thought it was going to be something like 'cooking' or 'embarrassing moments' or something broad like that.

Luckily we were able to come up with a story quite fast.  I actually thought of show-cats originally, but then decided chickens might be funnier and it seemed to spark something with the others and then everyone started throwing out jokes. Erika was storyboarding while we were throwing out ideas and we were actually laughing the whole time. By the time we were done, this is what we had:



 We made some minor adjustments and then started breaking it down into who would animate which scene.




Christian animated the grabbing and the roast scene:



Erika animated the swallow scene:


Eggy animated the pecking and the blowing up scene:



I animated the little jig that the fat chicken does and the weird ugly squashing scene lol:


Jon did all the backgrounds/layouts: (plus inside the barn)


Also a huge thanks to Erika who did a lot of fixing up, compositing and sound editing!


Trivia!
  • Within the last hour of the competition, Christian's Cintiq crashed and messed up all the coloured frames for the pecking scene. Jon and I had to speed colour around 200 frames in half an hour so that we could upload it in time!
  • The weird hen noise at the end where the egg comes out of the roast is actually Jon's voice.
  • We made a bit of a screw up by not colouring outside of the frame, which is why the human hand is 'dismembered', which you can see in the first screen cap for the grabbing scene.
  • The egg that the smaller chicken laid is not coloured in properly because Jon forgot that the background for the chickens was not going to be white!
  • I came up with the title 'Well-Fed', but before that we were thinking of 'Sunny side up', 'Cracked', and 'Fluffy Chickens' to name a few.
  • You can see the skinny chicken's bum-oley when he lays the egg out of shock:




Wrapping up

It was a great and fun experience all around. I feel privileged to have worked with such talented people and even though i was technically 'the group leader' it was really irrelevant to the process because everyone brought their A-game. I also learned how to compromise in spite of creative differences, and to stop and listen to what others had to say--even if you think your idea is the best.

 I still remember crying with laughter when we all watched the scene where the chicken squishes his head in and does the weird tongue flicking thing. I have to say i still laugh at the gravy farting noise and the egg at the end, but i'm probably biased :)


Here are the winners of the competition!
1st: Deflated
4th: Dig In  Go Sheridan!!

And the other teams from Sheridan:


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