Hello Newgrounders,
A while ago I actually missed the chance to mention my latest animated shorts for NATA'14 here.
So In case you're interested in some small notes on the process I'll use this text to elaborate a bit:
'Emergency Breakfast'
This was my short for Intermediate round; animated in 4 days: It was pretty fun to make (robotic characters were surprisingly fun to animate in Frame-by-frame animation, somehow mixing "organic" and "mechanic" movements). I'm not sure if it was because of the 'robot' theme (or the thumbnail pic); but it had A LOT more reach than my other latest shorts (also it could stick in frontpage a bit more within robot day :) ).
The "story" could've been a bit more elaborated, but I was pretty glad with the results (and it also helped to try some new things for a short,like frame by frame "3d" rotations).
At the end my opponent didn't upload anything, so I passed freely to the Pro round (it could've been a nice opportunity to make a stick fight or something).
'Dimensional Flakes' (a short about cereal; curiously another "breakfast" related animation)
Made for the Pro round: a bizarre and (really small) oddyssey into an unpredictable cereal-distorted dimension.
The process for this one was actually pretty insane; I could (barely) finish the animation, although at the same time, it's probably the most 'elaborated' thing I've made within just 3 days of animation.
Right: Three days; doing almost nothing else during the whole process (except for eating and sleeping a bit, so it's really not something I would actually recommend that much).
One of the few things that helped to finish in time was to keep the main character as simple as possible to avoid loosing too much time on his animations (in this case, one of the most time-consuming parts).
On the process I was expecting to improve here on A LOT of things from my latest sumbissions (specially on the fbf animation, experiment with visual effects, sound and transitions)
but I couldn't give it that much time; mostly because I had just finished design school last week (Hooray!) so I needed to stop making things for a brief moment). Also, it came with a 'creative block' in between which took a couple of days to get through and finally decide on what to make.
At the end I wasn't really satisfied with the results, while the idea was fun to execute and after all it was a "watchable" animation; it needed AT LEAST 2 or even more busy days of work to tweak everything properly and be an animation a worthy of the 'Pro-Round'. I'd say it needs a lot more work than all my previous Nata submissions so far.
Considering that, it was REALLY hard to know my chances on this round, specially considering the competition (which was pretty close (specially to Brewster's) on the final scores!).
At the end, while I still consider it an 'incomplete' work, it got a pretty nice response after all.
And, now: I'm at the Final Round against Stejk-Robot (who has made some pretty sick/amazing things on the last rounds) with the theme of :
* Animate in the Style of Your Opponent *
Which is a surprisingly unexpecting and "chip-changing" theme; so, I guess the results are going to be pretty unusual/odd/hilarious for both cases.
AND that's it for today!
Tune in around Agoust 20 to see the outcome of this experimental final round! (hopefully I'll be able to step out of the comfort zone for a while)
(I hadn't realized how cool it's to write post with this new layout design)
MateusAbrantes
Holy sh!t. 'Emergency Breakfast' was one of my favorite animations in the few past months and you spent only 4 days to get it done? :o I can't handle such efficiency. You definitelly deserve to be between the finalists, Butz. There's only one more to go now. Good luck!
Butzbo
Great to know you liked that one!; Still, a bit of that was possible because the main character was this little robot I had been sketching for a while, so luckily I didn't spend that much time on the design of the characters.
Thanks for the encouragement! :D