This wasn’t on a Saturday but instead a week night! I had been meaning to post this for quite a while, heh. You might remember me doing stop motion the other day and this time I got to see the student groups doing their animation! And… they had 3 weeks to do their production! Good grief.
The 10 teams had their own mini production suite which pretty much looked like pasar malam tents. Also, it was pretty dark since it helped with the lighting conditions in each of their own mini tents.
As the group of us who were invited to check their progress out went around, I was all “!!!” because the students are VERY ambitious. Back when my friends and I did animation, our unsaid motto was to do as little as possible but yet tell enough of a story. Of course, we had a longer deadline because we needed to do more than just animating etc. We had to do the script, audio and everything else on our own with help from friends but you get the idea. These students were just freaking ambitious in their productions.
One of them had a kitchen set built! Well, they had help from Animagine, the ones who taught them how to do animation but pretty much, the main action had to be done by them. YES, that is REAL bread you see there. Apparently they had a custom bread pan made in the shape of Singapore! There are tiny details about the ingredients too but you guys will be able to see it when the whole animation is completed.
When I meant ambitious, some of these people even made props to take pictures of before cutting them up into pieces in the software. So it’s like 2d stop motion or flash animation but instead of drawn articles, the parts are made of pictures of real things! So in a way it looks like 3d but it’s 2d?! I’m definitely wanting to see if they had lighting systems in the cartoon itself with shadows in the end product for this.
I have no idea how extensive the budget is but this team got salt! As in special coloured salt imported from Australia. Besides doing the 2d animatics or the guide for the actual animation done in 2d, this one team wanted to recreate it in salt. Remember what I said about 1 second of animation is about 24 frames? Yeah well, WHAT ARE THESE STUDENTS THINKING? To be awesome, that’s what.
Oh and yes, you can actually eat and cook with the salt only apparently I was told it’s even saltier than our regular table salt. Salt. Salt. Ok, the word’s gone funny to me now. By the way, the students don’t have to spend anything on the production, that’s taken care of. What they need to provide is their hard work, imagination and team work. Also probably cash for dinner and snacks since they had to spend their days and nights doing their work there.
The students were pretty nice too! Working away diligently and concentrating on their work. For some of them, I like how their monitors are set up VERTICALLY instead of horizontally due to space and also for them to see their timeline and main stage of their animation. If you have no idea what the heck I just said, just go “Ohhh” and pretend you know that it means stuff moving on their computers, ok?
This team did all their frames on paper. This is a scary team in terms of ARE THEY PANICKING OR WHAT? Cause when we visited the teams, it was the last week of production and this team was halfway through. JUST HALFWAY THROUGH, LIKE AARGH. Just imagine THOUSANDS of pieces of paper being printed out, moved one by one for each frame. Whatever man, the final product will look good but such panic times indeed.
The techniques this year besides claymation, included light animation and I meant using LIGHTS on a black background mixed with PEOPLE in it, flash animation, 2d looking like 3d and so much more. It’s just freaking insane even if the audio is NOT going to be done by them but by a professional audio house, voice actors and actresses.
With that, I leave you with a semi familiar looking leg. Looks like Big Bird’s leg, doesn’t it? Hahahah, well anyway the craftsmanship of how they did their characters are scarily good. The NEMation videos will be out soon-ish next year (for at the time of post, next year is in a few days) since they’ve completed the main bulk of production! Watch out then to see when the voting is open for the teams cause woah… So much freaking hard work! They certainly should get all the attention for people to view their work!
