Dated: 09 October 2024
I learned about the 24 Hour Animation Challenge by Legends Animated while I was at 2024 SIGGRAPH hosted in Denver. A couple of the student volunteers from Texas A&M University mentioned it and how they have participated in it for a few years and they always had fun.
This got me really excited for this competition so I immediately reached out to our animation professor, Brett Rutland. He helped me organize the administrative side of this challenge. Some of the examples of this are that he had to get permission from the university to let us stay overnight, and he also had to help coordinate with security as the floor we were staying on typically closes at 1:00am each night. Brett also helped us start and end the competition and checked in on us during the livestream.
I was elected the team leader for this project, and we named ourselves "ChillinNKillin". We started brainstorming how we could prepare ourselves best for this challenge and we came up with the idea to host a mock 24 Hour Animation Challenge. We all met on Thursday, September 19th at 7:00am to run a practice session on how the 24 hour challenge might go. We created a random theme based around Space. We started the entire process with brainstorming an idea, and then creating a general theme that we wanted to focus our story on. We then made storyboards and worked on refining these storyboards for the next 3 to 4 hours while simultaneously starting our asset list to start modelling.
Throughout this process, we divided all of the work based on how comfortable people are within the 3d pipeline. Everyone had to model a little bit as we had to start the project somewhere. Gisselle mainly focused on character modelling and also modelling for the set. Olivia was focused entirely on texturing and lighting for the entire project. She also helped with compositing the final film at the end of the project. Corina helped out with lots of modelling along with layout and animation towards the end of the project. Kiera and I were focused on rigging the little characters along with most of the layout and animation for this project. It was really difficult during the modelling and texturing stages though as only a few of us were proficient in our generalist skills. Below is an image of the printer that I modelled along with the button with it.
Our project was going really well and we were making lots of progress. I think that we would have had a great film if we were able to submit all of our shots. Unfortunately, we ran out of time due to some circumstances and setbacks during the actual production process. Some of our layout shots were not referenced and it messed up everything when we went to actually replace some of the environment and character rigs.
We had a ton of funny things happen throughout the challenge. One of the first things that happened is when Olivia and Corina tried to go down to the 3rd floor to heat up their food around 10:05pm. Shortly after they left, we heard them screaming from the elevator, so I went and checked on Olivia and Corina. Apparently at 10:00pm the elevators in the building stop working, even with access to the floors, etc. This means that you can't even hit the open door button from the inside of the elevator. We had to use the stairs to reheat our food until the elevators started working again at 7:00am.
Another goofy story that came from this challenge is the security still came up and told us to leave at 1:00am. We explained the situation and he ended up being really cool and let us stay in the building, but we thought it was funny that they still had to check.
If you wanted to see our progress on this project, you can find the link here.
And if you wanted to see the entire 24 hour livestream, I have those linked right here & here. There are two parts because our school computers reset at 3:00am.
Overall, I am really glad that I was able to participate in this challenge with my friends and colleagues. I am so grateful that I can learn from some of the challenges and successes to help improve my leadership skills and management of the project. I can't wait to work on other projects in the future!
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