Reality Check

The results are in for the 11SecondClub contest I entered last month. My score was a 5.32 out of 11, the winner had a solid 7.63, and I was away from my hopes of ranking in the top ten by 1.24.

There are a host of factors that played into my lackluster ranking, but the main thing is the same old same old, keep things simple so they are both accomplish-able and stronger.



I was dealing with some 12 points of control to shape the tentacle which in and of itself was a pain to manage and figure out. I was also basically doing one action for each breathing noise, but not only that I was having him do big quick motions between each. In the blocking I didn't realize that with those moves I'd need much longer holds than I ended up with. It became a series of movements snapping from one pose to the next never really stopping to enjoy any of them in particular. If I had cut down those actions to fewer I could have strayed away from snapping in and out of each pose and also spend more of my time refining the movements into, during, and out of each pose. Lip sync was something people hit me hard for in the competition which is unfortunate but I did basically slam the lip sync in last minute. Literally, the morning it was due, I did the girl's lip sync in like half an hour before I left for work. She also suffered from a lack of attention because I spent all my time wrasting the tentacle into place and a lot of people wanted to see more from her. Since I really wanted you to not pay attention to her I guess I should have cheated and just done a rack focus away from her to beat people over the head to ignore her. Either that or just completely ignore her and stage the shot closer on the guy.


The main thing I had going for me was my idea. I worked on it with James P. Gibson a storyboard artist friend of mine. We went through a lot of ideas and explored what the sounds could be about that would make sense. (my apologies, I don't have a scanner, so I took these pictures with my webcam)












I'm going to at least skip this month's competition so I can work on my problem areas and hopefully I'll do better next time. It's definitely tough to do one of these while working 40 hours a week especially when those 40 hours are spent animating, it's important to step away and get a breather from time to time.