11 Second Club - View & Vote

The 11SecondClub is a good online resource for animators gone rusty or those wanting to enhance their show reel with a dialogue/ character acting animation sequence.


Don your berets and scarves, an SBIT student has entered 11SecondClub (again). Voting on the animation entries will occur over this weekend.

Some of the comments listed are from the January 2008 competition (the post has been recycled - Save the trees!).

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

By crikey this would have to be some of the best animation I have ever seen!

Ian said...

Voting should open tomorrow. OOOh its like opening presants at Christmas. Especially seeing the Ecritique at the end. :)

Nice work Frank, the intiative you've shown by doing this in your own time bodes well for your future.

frank said...

So, Ian, which animation from the 86 do you reckon will win the January competition?

There's a whole range again.

My top ones, in no specific order, are:

They all start with: www.11secondclub.com/vote/january08

/iO2l7h/

/4UBmn8/

/cZeSVp/

/MZF4JJ/

/2BI0d2/

I reckon mine's good for about 70th place.

Maybe, '/iO2l7h/' or '/4UBmn8/', appeal to my viscera the most.

Ian said...

Man this is taking a while, I think if they are going to continue to attrct more entries then they might have to change their voting system.

Don't know how, but there has to be a better way than this.

Ian said...

I tried to be as impartial as I could, but I ended up with you much higher than 70th Frank.

My favourites were

this one

This one

This one

This one

And this one

frank said...

Yeah Ian I like your selection.

The 3D fish one didn't appeal to me as much as the fish 2D one.

Is thew 3D one a bit of a 'cheat' to get away with floaty animation?

I think the 2D fish one was a bit more zippy in timing, it showed that push and slide that fish do to get through water. The 2D fish seemed more masters of their own movement.

The little green guy 3D animation is great. There is some good gestures and timing that contrast well with the acting of the couple trying to avoid him.

Thanks for providing your selections.

I'd like to pick at them a bit more, or maybe have a close look at the winner and learn from what's good and not so good.

Maybe have a look at it before the official critique goes up and see if I can see some of the same stuff as the AnimationMentor.

Ian said...

There were lots of Fish, and lots of sitting in cars. This is the problem with the current voting sysytem, by the time I got towards the end I was like, "Oh another one in a car" or "More fish?" I think fish are a bit of a cop out hand drawn or 3D, no balance to deal with. Not that that is an issue, I guess coming up with an original cheet is the trick.

Whats even harder to understand is the people who animated all of their characters walking along. Its so much harder to nail some great gestures on hooks if they have to be overlapped with a walk. Its OK if your shooting for the standard of the Flinstones or Smurfs, but thats about it.

frank said...

Thanks for the tip about walking.

Now you say it, I can see it.

This is good stuff.

Cutting people off with car seats and windscreens, dare I say, flying saucer dash boards, putting them in wheel chairs (there was a few of them), all seemed to provide opportunities for having to do less animation.

I think you might mention in one of the video tutes on character animation, that if a student is going to animate characters behind a foreground element, that we should still animate the whole character to get the sense of balance required. That is, still draw the hips and legs in the poses. I tried to think of that and in the rough animation drew in the legs (but copped out in cleaning up anything below the dashboard).

I noticed a few people in the comp used a conveyor belt, or in one case, a trainline push trolley, to have that sense of moving along but allowing the characters to be standing in the one place (e.g. the 3 cows).

Thanks for these extra insights.

Do you have any comments on 4UBmn8, the one with the 3 monsters destroying the city and one monster coughs up a yellow person?

I looked at it a few times and came to the conclusion that the deceptively simple, yet strong, graphic design may hide some solid staging, colour use, acting and gestures, as well as a quirky interpretation.

Ian said...

That one was original for sure, but its not like the animation blew me away.

I guess the quick pacing of the dialogue was a strainge match for the actions in the scene.

I can't flaw the animation really though, was nice. I can't be too critical, I'm the guy who inspired the comment, "wheres the fruit cake?" in the December comp :)

Ian said...

I should point out that sometimes in a story it is necisary to overlap walking and acting. Its just that in this case you can make up your own setting so why would you?

Terry said...

Hey Frank, great job. Haven't seen the others yet but I will. Boy, that was a tough bit of dialogue to animate to... very ambiguous gag, and THREE characters to boot! You made it work in a very creative way.

frank said...

Terry, thanks for your comments.

Luckily I went into the task oblivious that it might be a tough gig. Maybe that's a good thing to remember for students? Send them into a task saying, "Here, you have a go," and not tell them how tough the task actually looks/is.

Learning that something is a hard slog by experience is valuable. I think it is a teacher's role to make sure the student gets through it with a few helpful pushes along the way.

The animating hill did get steeper and steeper in the clean-up and inbetweening stages, as I realised that 3 characters triples the amount of drawing. And by reverse mathematics , possibly, then cuts the time thought available down to a third.

I now know that, if a deadline is short, I'm going to focus the animation on one character for 2D.

3D, well, I know zilch.

frank said...

Ian, thanks for your comments. They are nuggets.

frank said...

44th out of 85. That's better than 70th! Plus I got a bunch of comments to work through and digest. This competition was well worth doing.

frank said...

The other part is judging and seeing how my star allocation compared to the other 580 odd animators who voted.

This tests my animation eye.

The general spread is pretty close; that is if I rated something 2 it got 1.8 - 3, and not 7.

My top tips were:

/iO2l7h/ = 2nd

/4UBmn8/ = 9th

/cZeSVp/ = 3rd

/MZF4JJ/ = 24th! (urgh) (gave it 9 and it rated 4.9)

/2BI0d2/ = 11th

Ian said...

Well done mate :)

I knew you would be way above 70th.

frank said...

April 2008 1st year animator Mitch entered the April 2008 11sC competition.

View his entry here

Mitch entered a 3D piece but had never animated using 3D software. This is his intuitive work using a program he hasn't been taught.

Brave man!