Engagement: The Anijam and 24 HOURS competitions

Anijam – (10th-12th August 2018)

In the summer before third year, myself, Adam Frith, Munty Chowdhury, Paul Reynolds and Leah Pierson competed as a team, under the name of ‘The United States of Salford in the Anima18/ Anijam 48 hour challenge.

"Each year WONKY partners with Encounters Film Festival to bring you the AniJam Challenge, a 48hr creative animation mission. The AniJam challenge is simple. Create an animated film based around a specific themes in 48hrs. 48hrs to create an animation from start to finish? Sound Crazy? Well over the years we’ve had hundreds of talented creatives taking part and coming up with brilliant films in the process.

In 2018 we’ve been delighted to join forces with Anim18 to deliver AniJam UK and take AniJam nationwide. Over the summer, animators across the UK were invited to take part in a 48-hour animation challenge across seven regional heats."

We had to attend a briefing at HOME theatre, hosted by Greg Walker, of the ‘Skwigly’ podcast. The keyword that was briefed nationally was the word ‘Together’, with a regional keyword of ‘Landmark’, outlining that we had to include a landmark of the city that we have submitted from.

Paul Reynolds thought of some story ideas for our animation and it wasn’t long before we’d brainstormed an idea and committed it to a storyboard.

We put the storyboard to an animatic in adobe premiere and Paul was to be put to use as our sound designer, (considering that Paul was the only team member that couldn’t animate). Myself and Munty combined out sketched-out efforts to reach a consolidated digital set of character designs.

We decided that once we had split our shot list up that we would all go our separate ways and animate from home considering that we had about 37 hours left to more effectively complete our scenes.

At first it was all going well. I made sure that I plodded through my scenes over the course of the next day and a half, but due to some software issues occurring with other members of the team, myself and Adam had to each take on more scenes than we originally anticipated- this meant that we did end up losing some essential hours of sleep and thusly the overall quality of the final animations combined together was also lost.

I was overall pleased with the scenes that I ended up animating though, as they would become great opportunities to bulk out my animation showreel. Below are some examples of the cartoonish performances I was able to quiet easily push from the simplistic cartoon design.

There were definitely moments over that weekend that felt like we were out of our depth but we managed to push ourselves to see how fast our animation skills could be put to use.

There’s something very satisfying about finishing a project on such a quick turnaround with a team of talented animators, writers and artists. This project really highlighted how talented my teammates were when working in high pressure situations. I was happy to see that we all were up to the task.

This experience is really good for up and coming animators because it gives us a chance to show that we are up for a challenge and what’s more we are indeed capable at an industry level.

Something which can get lost when working on university or work briefs is the pure fun aspects of animating. This animation was purely for fun and doubled as a really useful way to test out our skills. The fact that we could win a public vote or get a chance to have our short screened at various festivals across the country is something else entirely!

I created this piece of artwork for said article to represent our team members:

Voting for the public choice award opened on 1st September, and is open until 31st October, and I’m really pleased to say we’re well in the lead. Something we never expected against some really high calibre teams. It was really cool to see all of the different responses to theme of together. And I’m looking forward to meeting some of the other animators at some of the screenings taking place at festivals around the country.

Our entry would be screened along with all the other entries at the following festivals:

Glasgow Film – 27th September

Encounters Film Fest – 29th September

Glasgow World of Film Fest – 30th September

Borderlines Film Fest – 18th – 21st October

Manchester Animation Festival – 15th November

(UPDATE: WE WON!)

24 HOURS - (5th-6th October)

Once October came around at the start of second year, myself, Adam Frith, Munty Chowdhury, Leah Peirson, (and new addition to the competition team) Oli Barnacle. (Below is the logo I designed for our group).

The first team to win this globally-run student animation competition were promised 5 £1,400 scholarship prizes for specialist workshop classes in California. We realised that this competition was going to be harder than the Anijam brief because we had less time, more competition and more restrictions.

We arranged for our team to be able to stay overnight at the university and we tuned-in to the live stream being hosted in America.

Once the stream briefed us, we instantly got into our preproduction phase. We drew out as many character designs as we could and soon had more of an assortment of A4 panels.

These were consolidated as a storyboard, but time was of the essence and we had to get animating as soon as possible.

It wasn't long before we had the shot list together and we were in the full swing of animation. This was all within the first third of the completion, which was ideal because we still had the remaining two thirds of the twenty four hours for animation production and post production.

The hours spent towards the end of this project were by far the most gruelling, after nearly 24 hours straight of being in the same two rooms, making a cartoon, we all began to loose our grip on our tempers and reality. As you can see in this photo (pictured below), I was looking particularly tired, despite my best efforts at trying to get some form of sleep in the tutors staff room, during the Saturday afternoon.

Oli was again helpful in the sense that he had been subbed in for Paul, (Paul Reynolds isn't a student and the 24 HOUS co mp is a student exclusive competition) as our sound designer.

However we managed to finish our animation fully, with an hour to spare, so that we could go over any last second changes in the post-production process. We uploaded our animation to the ‘24 Hour Arty People’ YouTube channel and it was added to the 24 HOURS competition playlist.

We found out a couple of days later that we came 16th out of 195 teams, to be in the top 20 of so many submissions was a good enough prize for us and I felt showed that with this result, along with our Anijam result, we had very good chances of doing even better next year.

Below is the animation that we ended up submitting:

I'd like to think these competition animations we've done together has perhaps put us on the radar of people in the industry. I definitely know that we all want to do another animal submission next summer and we certainly feel like its been a fair assessment as what we are all like as animators in high-pressure situations.

Working with Leah in both of these project basically showed me that I deffo wanted to work with her on my graduation film and I have been able to make professional links and friendships with second years such as Oli, Munty and Adam. These quick-turnaround competitions are vital for students and I personally believe that every animator should do one at least once.