For the past 2 or more weeks me and my friend Adam have been training really hard for Skills Manitoba some may know this already.. but anyway our multimedia teacher talked to us I think around october about being in Skills for 3d desgin and animation. So of course we say yes and up until a few weeks ago we hadnt really done much to prepare, so when we realized it was fast approching we buckled down and work our asses off. Funny enough the rest of the students in our little nerd group that were goin to skills also realized this and pretty much the consensus was...oh fuck we're screwed.

For the most part this all turned out to be true, but unlike what they were entering in for, our competition had a good chance of being totally easy. HAHA it was well as far as we know it was pretty much a done deal.

The Theme for our animation was Heroes and Villans (make a tv show trailer or something) anyway we adapted our story to it in like seconds.

We trained hard, came up with good characters and an easily adaptable storyline, in the competition you wont know what the theme will be till you sit at your computer and like seconds later your workin on it. So it was a 6 hour competition with a half hour break for lunch, started at 7:30 (sorta) and ended at 2. First hour we arnt alowed to use a computer, gotta make character model sheets, front, side, back and 3/4 view, as well as a story board. So me and adam did that pretty fast with about 90% of the drawing being me lol.

So after that hour we modeled our characters as fast as we could, I had put my base modeling of the character done to 40mins but materials and rigging ( making him move the way you want placing bones in certain areas) So it took longer for me than it should have. As we were modeling I noticed one of the teams in front had these full human like characters at first I was like holy crap we're screwed but I realized as it had only just started that there was no way they could have modeled that, that fast. Realized they arnt using 3dsmax but some lame studio 4d and just draggin premade models and editing them the way they want.

As the day went on I looked over to see there progress, ours not being as good as we would have wanted..I such at animating my guy to walk. But anyway we looked ahead and noticed how crappy there thing was, everything was premade it seemed and they have big word bubbles for talking. If you know Second Life well basicly it looked like that almost exactly.

So me and adam our really worrying about what the other two teams were doin, when the near the end we get a sigh of releif when one team blurts out "how do you render" me and adam cracked up a bit and thought why would you come to a 3d animation competition and not learn how to render the animation so you know they can see it as a movie. Anyway I animated like two scenes, and then I decided adam should do the rest and I render what he does and composite the rendered videos in premiere.

So yeah at the end our story kinda worked out even though we couldnt make half the scenes but we choose the ones that we could put together and make the most sense. Luckly it worked out fine, our models are great and the last animation was the best we had, lighting was perfict and it just flowed sooo sooo well.

Now we get to go to Nationals in Saskatoon (its in Saskatchewan which is beside Manitoba and on the other side is Alberta, for those that dont know as Manitoba and Saskatchewan tend to be unkown to allot of people, which is fair since its just flat boring plains lol)

Im not really all that excited about going to saskatoon though ive never been so I shouldnt really say anything though it just a feeling really, but im more exicted about a real challenge to face. though at nationals its not a 6 hour thing its 2 days, 12 hours all together I think or 14 dont remember, well it was last year.

But Nationals our on June 6th-9th so me and adam have allot of time to up our game, though there is one team we didnt get to see what they had done or anything though they got silver which was a given I think but im interested in how bad the animation must be, will see it on monday.

As well ill be gettin a copy of the winning movie hehe, ill post it around to see how others like it, as me and adam are very critical about our work and well we are baseing it on how our story board not matchin up very well to the animation.

But anyway this blog is too damn long sorry, all and all it was a good day, winning gold yays, btw I havnt won anything like this since 1999 I think. As for the rest of Tec Voc well we didnt sweep up as many medals as we did the last 2 years, only 3 areas of skills got gold for tec, Robotics (a given pretty much) and TV production (also a given, tec won gold, silver and bronze actually)


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