Realizing that Glaiel has the programmers busy with his Tron AI Flash-off thread, i thought it would be nice to set-up some low commitment little flash animator challenges every other week. Just kinda fun excersizes that you can do and we can talk about and show each other.. the idea in these is to 1) practice (duh)... and 2) to get inspired by the way other people solve animation problems and also get feedback from your fellow peers.
I had done this before and it faded and i think it was because it wasnt simple enough. Anyway no harm in starting fresh.
I'll start it off for a few weeks and then maybe eventually we can cycle around and give other people a chance to play 'host' and make challenges
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Rules are simple:
- Constructive feedback only. The aim is to improve here.. lets keep junk reviews on the portal :)
- No stick figures. Its a brand new world when you start animating real characters, lets concentrate on that rather than faceless sticks. obviously you can start it as a stick for preliminary work
- keep it simple. this thread isnt after award-winning pieces.. they are excersizes. Obviously you shouldnt be spending more than a week on these... hell you probably shouldnt be spending more than 2 days tops.
- no backgrounds... unless the weekly challenge specifically requests it.. you can just have your character floating in space or with some light bg references if you want. Again this is mostly because we are concentrating these on very specific things and its distracting and probably not worth your time to be workin on a monster bg for what is just an excersize.
-color: optional. Again if you want to be really rough, b/w sketchy. Go for it. Its just a weekly thing so maybe its not worth going into your all out shading style.
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You can use SpamTheWeb.com to host your little swfs. or whatever other site you prefer
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Week 1: Put on some clothes
The challenge is to animate your character/yourself/whatever.... gettin into some sort of clothing. Could be a jacket, a pair of pants, a single sock, whatever you want. Depending on the level of challenge you want you could really have fun with this... while you could just have him put on a hat or something lame like that.. you arent going to learn much from it and people wont really have any feedback for you so why bother?
I'll participate in most of these, as i havent animated in some time. I could use the flash sweat beads dripping down my beautiful face!
