Mothman Cartoon Animation Contest $

[twistedgate]

Twisted Gate Entertainment www.twistedgate.com is running a contest for a Mothman cartoon. The winning toons will be included on a dvd and everyone included will recieve a copy. The winning toon creator will recieve a cash prize of 100 bucks and have bragging rights. All of the accepted toons for the dvd will be allowed to post their contact info and links at the beginning or end of their toon.

The Rules?
1.Go to google.com and search the keyword "Mothman". You will see artwork and descriptions and history on the creature. Make your toon something to do with this creature. It can be serious, action, comedy, etc., whatever you choose.
2.It must be your own toon. If you have someone help you, that is fine, just credit them.
3.It must be atleast 1 minute long and as long as you want it.
4.It must be a stand alone toon, not interactive.
5.Yeah, that's it! Basically the sky is the limit with this one.

The Deadline?

May 15th, 2006 midnight PST

Terms
Ray Scott, owner of Twisted Gate and a select few editors will judge the entries according to originality, design, wit, and presentation

Winners will be announced May 25, 2006.

Prizes
1st place: 100 dollar cash prize and featured on our DVD
Runner-Ups: included on our DVD

Also if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! [e-mail]

[wesdood]

would you be getting any rights to our submission?

[twistedgate]

nope, just permission to use your toon on our dvd if accepted. Thanks

[<deleted>]

I simply ADORE mystical creatures, and the Mothman is one of my faves.

I've been actually wanting to do a mothman cartoon for the last month or so now!

And now there's a contest?

Hellz, yeah!

[twistedgate]

Glad to have you in the contest!

[Longover]

Add two zero's to that $100

[TMP3z]

At 2/26/06 03:23 AM, Longover wrote: Add two zero's to that $100

I agree. Now if we include music, lets say uh, Metallica we would need permission from them since your going to be making money (somewhat) off it. If we do and we didn't get permission would we automatically be disqualified?

[twistedgate]

WOW. 10 grand...we're not that kind of company. I'm just curious, how much time can go into a 1-2 minute cartoon? I am guessing 10-30 hours of time invested? Am I close to being right? This is the time quoted me by a few animators.

Now take comic books for example. You need to concept the story, write it, edit it, pencil it, ink it, color it, letter it, lay it out, do graphic designs, print, advertise, solicit, and the list goes on. All of this easily takes months and months and people are willing to work on a quality project at lower costs or even sometimes for free to build resumes in order to get other bigger jobs.

It seems to me, our first dealings with animators were they were very greedy and aren't willing to do anything except small 10-30 second toons for a grand. Why are the comic book workers of the world so eager to get into the business and build strong relationships with each other when animators seem to be the opposite?

I don't want to step on anyone's toes and I know there are wonderful animators out there that do these things but our dealings with them before this contest have been that way. I just don't see something that takes a fraction of the amount of time being worth so much more than comic book creation that takes months or even a year. I can understand if it was a complete 90 minute film but we are talking 1-3 minute toons here that will be distributed and seen with each animators ads. This in itself is a good way to build resumes for the people here that didn't go to the best tech college or be lucky enough to do work for bigger companies website flash or whatever.

We are a small press company with hundreds of artists and writers, actors/actresses etc. and we all work long hours for little money. Most of the products we do sell at Twisted Gate, we don't make much off of. We sell things for very little over cost in order to sell more and promote more than anything. You need a strong fan base in order to ask for ridiculous prices and get them. This dvd alone will bring us in our money invested back and maybe another hundred or two. This is a direct market dvd project. People not interested in the Mothman will never buy this. A small percentage of people interested in the mothman (which is already a small percentage) will buy it and a handful of our regular customers will grab a copy. When we distribute it we make cost back and no profit. The dvd's will only be like 5 bucks or something small so 10,000 bucks or even a 1,000 bucks could be used alot more efficiently like advertising, promotion, public relations, more products, etc.

If we spent that kind of money on projects we would have filed bankruptcy a long time ago. Sorry we are not more high budget but we are a cool company with alot of quality products out now and a fan base that's built relationships with distributors and people in the business. People have gone on to work with big companies after working with us. We have people that moved on to companies like Marvel, DC, Image, Chaos, Dark horse, Disney and various video game companies. We are one of the easiest companies to work with and we hope that everyone involved in this contest will work with us again in the future. This is our goal.

Thanks,

[twistedgate]

yes, you need to use copyright free music unless you have permission and can credit the copyright owners. Thanks,

[s1nt3ch]

well actually to get the same quality out of a cartoon as you do a comic book , you have to do like 10 times as much work as a comic , it's just common sense animation=moving pictures by no means is as easy as you make it out to be. example
http://www.newground..m/portal/view/189081
this i believe took several months of work rather than 10-30 hours and it was made by one person.
now if your talking low quality cartoons sure your timeframe is probably correct and also the people that ARE making the low quality stuff shouldn't gripe about money

[BlackLizard]

I might be interessted in joining the contest although I have some qustions . Firstly what kind of style are you looking for? and where will the DVD's be published? I would also like to know what the goal of this project is.

By the way,don't take everyone here serious.I mean this is a teen-based site which means that alot of immature people spend time here. The price seems like a good payment compared to the time investment, even though making the animation might even take more than a week but of course that depends in what qualitys you are seeking. Please reply to this post,thanks in advance!

[twistedgate]

ok, let me rephrase that. I am sure there are tons of toons that take months to complete and the one you mentioned is a really great example all around but I still don't see it being more work than a quality well done comic book. Now I would put our best comic up against that guy's best toon and I would compare many things and I'm sure there won't be much difference in time invested but why would he charge thousands more to do it than a comic book creators would?? Not him in general but any animator (because I don't know what he personally would charge since I never talked with him or met him..lol) It just seems that the comic business is more friendly and more collaboration friendly than the animation business.

Also I in no way think animation is as easy as throwing some moving parts together. I actually have flash 5 and have played around with it so I know how long alone it took me to make a ball bounce around so I completely respect animators for what they do and the time involved. I just wanted to make the comparison with comics and see what some of you guys and gals thought.

[twistedgate]

Hello, glad your interested in the contest. We don't have a style we are looking for. As long as it has to do with the mothman you are good. It's your toon so you pick the style, genre, content, etc. We wanted you guys to do what you do, how you wanna do it.

The dvd's will be published by us, Twisted Gate Entertainment www.twistedgate.com check us out!

Our goal is to run a cool contest where animators can do an anthology dvd and one of them win a little cash. We also want to build a relationship with you animators in order to see who we might wanna hire or work with again in the future. We have a strong comic book following and now we are wanting to cross over into a little animation.

I hope that helps and if anyone has anymore questions feel free to e-mail me or fire away here. I check this site frequently. Thanks

[Luis]

animations are very time consuming.. more so if its client/paid work... lets face it. its difficult to get turned on by someone elses vision or dream....

its not that animators are greedy. Matter of fact being in the scene for about 5 or so years i have found that if anything animators are underpaid most of the time.

quality animation takes time... alot of it. If you were in the animation field you'd understand our pain. Flash is a great program and it has opened up some time saving utilities to the animator's toolbelt but complex quality animation still needs to be done the old fashioned way.. and that is drawing each frame over and over again.

It is extremely difficult for everyday people to grasp that concept. I have gone into many meetings and have spent all afternoon debating with clients about why a minutes worth of animation costs what it does. They just dont understand how 24 drawings could equal 1 second of airtime.

-L

[twistedgate]

Here is how I see it. Atleast paying a good sum to create a comic makes sense considering you can sell the finished product and if it's good you can make a little money or get lucky and have a hit.

If I have a 1 minute toon chances are...I have a 1 minute toon that I can't do anything with. If I was a giant corporation and wanted to create a small flash for the corps website I can see paying a top animator to do this. If I had a cartoon series in mind I wanted to pitch to studios or whomever i can see the same. But if none of the above applies then what good is a 1 minute toon? I may be missing something but it seems it is alot of work to do a toon with quality but it is one of those things that's only worth what someone will pay you for it. Did big corps that wanted the 1 animation set the standards for what doing a job is worth?

Take graphic design for example. The cheapest you can get a logo done for now adays is usually 150 bucks and most cost 300-400 bucks. Now I work with alot of graphic designers and they let me know their basic day to day operations and there's nothing to what they do in order to charge that kind of money. For example, one of my guys can do a quality logo within 20 minutes with different variations to pitch. Somewhere along the line companies started paying the 3-4 hundred bucks and set the standard that we are stuck with today for logos.

Now take all of that into consideration. Does a company have to be a multi million dollar corp in order to do business today? With the costs of everything involved there's no way a small budget company can get ahead in today's world. It costs more to produce products that are of any quality than the profit it sees.

ok, now think on this. We have this problem in comics as well. How can someone that learned to animate toons or whatever go to a company and say "Hey, I will do your animation for 1000 bucks" and not even have a resume. Nine times out of ten they ask for so much down and the rest upon completion...who in their right mind would say ok and pay them? These same people come to comic companies asking for 100 bucks a page for pencils or whatever they work at. Doesn't one have to build a resume anymore? We have artists that work for Marvel or DC comics and they will do very discounted rates or even free work in order to get their work out there more if they know the publisher is legit and out to actually release the projects. So with that being said who the hell do these noname artists with no credits or resume at all think they are asking for an amount like that?

If you were going to hire a basketball player for a commercial you would want Jordan or Shaq not billy joe bob from whereever that sits on the bench every game. Would you pay shaq the same amount you would pay the bench warmer? Same applies to comics, logos, animations or whatever else.

Small companies publishing quality stuff must depend on those out there that feel the same way as I do. Those that are willing to work at something to build their resume or gain experience. Those that want things that stand out on their resume so when multiple people bid on a job their work stands out among the rest. There are also those that do things as a hobby and do it for self satisfaction. I have artists we work with that are Doctors, Lawyers and even a Dentist. Neither have any interest in getting paid to do a thing. The one Doctor has done all kinds of work for us and has turned down thousands of bucks over the last couple years. He is happy getting some free copies of the books and passing them out to friends and family.

I'm done rambling for tonight but I just wanted to hear all sides of this animation circle since our company is trying to get into it. I look forward to hearing some thoughts from some of you.

Thanks

[twistedgate]

At 2/26/06 11:45 PM, No-oneSpecial wrote: This sounds interesting, but I'm wondering about this concept, would you mind if I contacted you for more details?

thanks for the interest. What's to wonder about? The contest is pretty self explanatory and we thought it was a really cool idea to get something new out there. You should see what we have planned next after this! If you want to discuss some things feel free to contact me at [e-mail] . We can discuss whatever you want. Thanks

[TMP3z]

Yeah, but the point is your not paying anyone. It's just a contest where only one person actually sees real money. Thats not much of an initiative for me at least.

I wouldn't gamble on a small chance at winning $100 when I could get a sponser for $200. Goodluck to ya.

[Longover]

I was just joking about the 10000 awhile back... I didn't want to get you bent out of shape.

[twistedgate]

At 2/27/06 03:17 AM, Longover wrote: I was just joking about the 10000 awhile back... I didn't want to get you bent out of shape.

nah, you didn't. I have been talking to alot of people and they were saying crazy things like the 10 grand thing and then that's when I decided to start a small discussion on it. I figured that was the best way to get some thoughts from some of you guys/gals.

[twistedgate]

bump

[Senri]

omfg!!!!!!! i luv mman ......its weird im making a flash on it to......to bad its not even closed to finished.......oh well i gotta watch em!!!! good luck yall oh and remember point pleasent and that ppl that c him there eyes get blood shot he has amazing 6th sense and he comes from point pleasent

[twistedgate]

At 3/4/06 02:38 AM, kevinvvfry wrote: omfg!!!!!!! i luv mman ......its weird im making a flash on it to......to bad its not even closed to finished.......oh well i gotta watch em!!!! good luck yall oh and remember point pleasent and that ppl that c him there eyes get blood shot he has amazing 6th sense and he comes from point pleasent

you should hop in the contest! It's always nice to meet people as interested in the mothman as we are.

[JPI]

At 2/27/06 04:33 AM, twistedgate wrote: nah, you didn't. I have been talking to alot of people and they were saying crazy things like the 10 grand thing and then that's when I decided to start a small discussion on it. I figured that was the best way to get some thoughts from some of you guys/gals.

Yeah, I think that got my interest more than the actual contest :)

It's interesting to hear someone with experience in a different field that is so close to animation and yet be so different in the process.
Going back onto the debate, animation is a slow process. There are many different forms of animation. The example that showed Prowlies at the river, is a top end high quality animation that is done because of the large budget, or because of the animators passion to do it (and this, was done for the latter). Animation can be like this, which is visually stunning (especially for an animator that can apprechiate the amount of hard work), or it can be a budget animation. These are the series that we see so comonly on our TV screen everyday. Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon and all that crap :P. But what is impressive (prehaps not those examples), but the skill involved to the designer. As animators need good characters, that are easily animatable, just having these characters can make the rest of the animaton process much easier. This can be seen such as "Peppa Pig", a series that is comicly created and animates simply without having to do any drawing. Or (one of my faves for design) the powerpuffgirls, which is done by the simplicity of design, making it easy to re-draw parts of the body, and then clean up the with that stylish "Cel Shading". So naturally, us animators are begining to see the design/storyboard/script side of work which also comic's have to do. But there are some differences, as we also have to provide audio to ontop of the flash, finding soundtracks, getting voice actors and finding (or even creating :/) sound effects. These are just some of the few problems that we face. Naturally we can overcome some of these problems much like a cartoonist, after experience we find that we can "fake" a lot of scenes by not animating things that don't need to be, changing screen shots to fake highly detailed action, creating suspense and not actually animating, changing headshots to prevent lipsync etc.
But animators i feel are underpaid (not because of the fact that we do too much work), but it involves experience. Normal companies will almost never touch an inexperienced animator, nor will they spend time scouting for sole animators. The people that get paid are normally those who are animating for a company and thus the company gets percentage of the cut. Also, i feel that the reason that animation is so high, is beacuse of this. Experience is needed for flash animations, and people won't touch you even though your a good artist, you won't produce good quality animations. It doesn't work that way. Lots of things are learnt and a year later down the line (although it feel like a lot more) i'm still learning animation and techniques to use. You probably realised this when you tried flash 5.
Anyways, i'm not actually having a argument, i'm just talking. Your profession must differ greatly, and on my first comic, i must of spent about 10 hours doing 16 panels :/ Fortunatly, that was my last :P
Just out of curiosity, did comic book producers use an animation disc, like we did. Considering you might of needed it to show small steps of animation (and would of helped when tracing out backgrounds again)?

An animation disc is a old tool for the first animations. It was a lightbox with a removable disc so you could trace drawings over and over, and you could spin it, for flexibility.

Now, regarding the contest.
I feel that people are put off by the fact that people can earn that much through nowadays as a guarantee, and this isn't a guarantee which means people can put a lot of effort in for no money.
Although, the DVD does sound interesting. Will it only be a combination of the animations? And do the runnerups/winner get a copy of the DVD?

I'll have a look at this further down the line.

- James

[Longover]

Hey wait... March 15 is the due date for this thing... But March 14 is Pi day.. I'm going be so busy that week.

[twistedgate]

all excellent points. I am not aware of any of our artists using it. Since backgrounds differ so much from panel to panel they usually just do backgrounds to fit the angle. Alot of small press artists cheat and leave backgrounds blank and that pisses off alot of people like us companies and the readers. Backgrounds are important in comics.

I can understand people not wanting to work on something that isn't a sure thing BUT isn't it a sure thing they may possibly get more attention as far as getting seen and their ads on the dvd actually working. We already have a huge reader fan base and they would love to see toons by us. Our mothman book was the highest ranked successful mothman comic ever. Don't you think those same people would love to see a dvd with toons on it? Exposure on this one will be good. We are only selling the dvd for 4-5 bucks so it's cheap enough for anyone to take the chance on it. We attend many shows around the country as well promoting our books and films. Although someone may get paid for their toon right up why not take a chance and possibly get 5 jobs out of 1 free toon? Who knows, you might get a job offer from somoene big?

Also, as stated, we are looking to build relationships with animators ourselves...why would we want to do that? So we know who to hire of course. Just because you didn't win the contest doesn't mean we don't wanna hire you to do some work for us. Do you even realize how many connections and people we know in the comic business? Now imagine how many of those want cartoons done of their comics. All I have to do is tell them how great you are and introduce the 2 of you and chances are you guys will work together.

Now onto another point. We license comics which means we buy the options from companies to do comics of their products like toy companies, famous singers, actors/actresses, tv shows, etc. We have 2 licensed toy company comics out now and we are discussing books with atleast a dozen other companies and agents for stars. If these people want comics chances are they would want a toon. Could you imagine how easy it would be to sell a comic that comes with a cartoon dvd? Now I don't know about you but how many of you would like to do a cartoon of a big star or a toy company? How would that look on a resume?

This contest is just our first try at getting into animation. If it's successful (which I'm sure it will be since we have plenty of entries) than good for all of us involved. If it isn't than we do plan B and figure out a way to make it so. Either way this dvd will be finished and we will have a winner. If anyone knows anything about Twisted Gate it's that we get things done. If you talk to anyone in small press they will tell you we haved grown leaps and bounds since we arrived on the scene while most others are either out of business or on their way of being so. We also do more shows than most. We have the diversity to be able to do more than comic shows and cross over into cryptozoology shows, toy shows, horror shows, car shows and more.

We welcome everyone to the contest. Let's do some work together and make this something fun for everyone involved including the people getting and watching the dvd once it's released!

[twistedgate]

bumpin it

[twistedgate]

bump

[citricsquid]

Arrr i would love to take part but the thing is what if the animation i make ( i am only a "begginer") Isn't good enough i will have spent day's on nothing, is there like someway of sponsoring the flash?

[twistedgate]

At 3/22/06 12:16 PM, Onnet092 wrote: Arrr i would love to take part but the thing is what if the animation i make ( i am only a "begginer") Isn't good enough i will have spent day's on nothing, is there like someway of sponsoring the flash?

You will still make the dvd and get a free copy and advertising. Also the contest isn't just judged on quality. It's judged on the story, presentation and more. You may be the best in all areas except quality and still win. Give it a shot. Chances are, it'll be fun and something you can use on your resume.

[SlayerV2]

Holy crap, I don't animate sprites, I suck, so I animate stick figures