"Reach the Moon" animation contest

With the release of 0.63.04 we have a new interpolation method, clamped, that we hope will be of good help to animators.
To promote this we are announcing an animation competition.

The topic is “Reach the moon”. Interpret this any way you like.
The focus will be on animation, motion will be considered more important than the rendition in this competition.
The new clamped interpolation has to be a major part of the animation.


[size=85]image by Ricardo Graça[/size]

The best animation will be picked by a jury and will win the book “The Animators Survival kit” (or another animation book if you already have this one).

The animation can be any length you like, but we encourage you to create something longer than 5 seconds. It can also be anything you like, just as long as it somehow relates to the topic, “reach the moon”.

The jury consists of David Rylander (rylleman), Konstantin Dmitriev (Zelgadis) & Ricardo Graça (ricardograca). Their decision is final.
[size=85](They can not themselves participate in the contest.
If the jury find that not enough submissions have been entered or for some other reason feel they can not choose a winner they can decide to not name a winner.)[/size]

We encourage all participants to share their source files for others to learn from. The winner will have to at least share the source files with the jury.

Deadline for the competition is sunday March 04, 8 p.m. CET. That gives you 3 weeks for your submissions.

Post your entries here in this thread.

Now animate!

Wooohoo!
Posting it on G+ and Facebook!
-G

Posting everywhere too!! Let’s Make it happen!!

How are your animations going? Are you busy creating?

We’ve had some questions if it is ok to use other applications for effects, composition and stuff. - It is alright, even if we encourage you to use Synfig only, it can do both effects and compositing. If you must use other applications we strongly suggest these are open source tools.
Also the contest focus on the animation so effects and such will not matter much in our reviewing.

Hello!
Are you nudging your ducks? I’m sure your animations will turn out fantastic!

In the meantime I did this which I hope will be encouraging or give inspiration!
https://vimeo.com/38155672

Here’s a screencast of me animating it. I captured with a frame per second so these 2 minutes is representing about 50 minutes of work.
https://vimeo.com/38155673

Here’s the source file.

Wow!
I have some questions related to the screenscasting!
What are those red marks on the timeline?
Did you use the Sketch tool to draw the main blob poses?
Why the red blob poses are sometimes onto the Synfig’s dialogs?
Did do some postprocessing on the screencast?

:slight_smile:

-G

Thanks.
The red marks is done by the compiz Annotate plugin. It’s one of my best work tools in animation. It lets you quickly draw sketches and notations on a layer above your desktop. I’ve got it bound to one of the flag keys, press the key, sketch, release key, continue work. It’s the one reason I want to stay with compiz, I haven’t found any other screen annotate tool this good.

Nope, dont use the sketch tool, for sketches it’s the Annotate plugin. But sketch tool is a great tool if you don’t have compiz!

The screencast is done with a bash-script that I found somewhere which takes a screenshot every second. I then composed these into a movie with ffmpeg. Only post processing is some cropping and downscaling in Handbrake.

@rylleman
nice!.. what’s your desktop specs, incidentally?.. I’m thinking of upgrading mine and I wonder how much of an influence on Synfig it would have.

This is my main work machine so it’s a bit on the heavy side. 8xIntel core i7, 3,2Ghz, 12Gb ram, GeForce GTX 480 graphics card. Linux Mint 11, 64-bit (gnome2 with compiz).
Synfig, and other applications, run very smooth here so sure, the hardware does matter, but you can do amazing stuff on older not so powerful hardware as well. You just have to be a little more patient.

I’ve just bought a new computer with half those specs (all I can afford!) and was thinking how fast it was :laughing:

Powerful machine, but more important is, you’re animation is absolutely professional one.

I would like to call back my attention from coding to animating, create a short cartoon movie for my daughter was one of the reasons I stay here.

So let me stop coding and start to join this contest :mrgreen:

One cookie of the progress…
youtu.be/KE1Dsk8FqEE
-G

Hello!
Deadline is coming closer on this competition, it’s just a few days left intil sunday evening.

So far there have been little activity here with just a few ones declaring their intention to participate.
Are you all holding your submissions until deadline?

Thank’s!
-David

Oh man!
My animation progress is about 25% o total. I don’t believe I can submit something usable! :frowning:
Anyway I’ll post here the scenes done and the working material.
-G

My humble entry

youtube.com/watch?v=gK6Ikg_4_yw
(please click the 480 version, the quality is much better than the default)

Dedicated to the synfig team, thanks for all your hard work guys, especially Genete, who helped me a lot.

Carbonphobia, great entry!
Thanks for the dedication!!! :blush: :blush:
-G

Hello,

This is my entry:

http://youtu.be/T72_vbO-mPw

I couldn’t complete it though. But it has been a great exercise!

Thanks Genete for the help with the walk, I get a much better understanding of the time-loop layer.

Cheers,
Manuel

I love this entry because it tells a charming story. Well done mospina!

Hello,
Here is my entry https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BzP3O3afEG04cmlvUERUSFFRYUdzYm4tQzF5OXpiUQ
The end is a bit rushed because I was short of time - and there is sound only at the end.
I forgot to write that the song was by Frank Sinatra.
I will add the .sifz files tomorrow
:smiley: thank you for comments :smiley:

Beautiful - I love the softness and the shadows. Really captures the feel of night-time.