New Contest Coming Soon!

Touched · Post by **Touched** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 4:24 am

I don't recall you ever disagreeing with me, Gnaws.

J. Baker · Post by **J. Baker** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 4:34 am

bupaje wrote:It'll probably run until 2/1/06 as was suggested...

Awe man I missed it... LOL, JK!

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:36 am

I've posted the contest page here and would appreciate a final review. There is enough there to get started and I'll fix any errors or make and make reasonable changes this weekend at which time the requirements will be etched in virtual stone - given that I slogged through this fairly quickly (well, 3 hours), I realize I may have overlooked something. I'll post the official announcement here and at e-frontier forums after I make any corrections tomorrow night based on your feedback.

I was thinking 720x480 and am not sure if I should specify an fps - I am just thinking it might be easier to require uniformity in size, format and fps to make posting all the videos, and converting sizes later, easier.

http://stormvisions.com/pages/contest.php

Special thanks to those who supported the contest.

artfx · Post by **artfx** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:48 am

Wow. This is really cool. It'll be a LOT of fun!

One note: 720x480 is an odd pixel aspect ratio for the computer(meant for NTSC video) and the images will appear stretched a bit. Unless these are going to end up on a DVD or something, a more computer friendly square pixel aspect like 640x480 might be better.

Touched · Post by **Touched** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:07 am

Yeah, I'd say 640x480 too. I'm just concerned that with no length limit, people with unlimited time to spend on hobbies and such may have a large advantage in this.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:09 am

Thanks both, will change now.

EDIT: As for length I expect the judging will be based on a balance of animation, meeting the requirements and wow factor. If participation is high enough I'll be glad to try to put a few together every so often and we'll adjust the approach as needed - say adding forum user votes to judges votes, time limits or whatever but given the little time I had I was in danger of over thinking it to the point of not getting it done. Let's see how it goes is the best I can say. At the very least it should be fun and produce useful content and example files.

Touched · Post by **Touched** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:18 am

Just to be clear, all entries will be made available as .anme files for everyone to download and see how we did it, correct?

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:31 am

Yes. That was always a big point of these contests for me. I did this on a very popular Visual Basic programming site I had and I would sometimes get 30-40 contest entries, all with different and often innovative solutions to the same problem. Most of the site visitors found these very useful. Heck if we got 10 entries and each of these also added one free prop or background they created, running one contest every month we'd have a lot of free user content in a few months.

IsraelRN · Post by **IsraelRN** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:03 am

Maybe duration shouldn't be fixed, only minimum& maximum...

like 10 minimum, 30 maximum...

dunno

Israel RN

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 2:39 pm

I really think you need to have some kind of length limitation. A max time. Otherwise you might get gone with the wind.

-vern

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 4:09 pm

For some reason I thought someone objected to a time limit earlier but on rereading I see that was mistaken.

I added the min: 10 - max: 30 sec requirement as suggested. Thanks. Have to head of to my internship now, will finalize tonight. Please let me know if the file format of the movie - mov or divx is a consideration?

MattVG · Post by **MattVG** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 4:45 pm

So there's no theme then. We make an animation using three particular props.

Just to add my two cents: I think it'd be fun in future contests to have some sort of theme for everyone to deal with in their own unique way. Something like: why did the chicken cross the road? Or something equally random

and then see what kind of creativity leaks from peoples' brains to solve this age old question.

I find I do better when my creativity is slightly focused.

- Matt

artfx · Post by **artfx** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 5:54 pm

Blast! I thought I did, in fact, object to the time limit. Oh well... I hope there will be chances to do longer stuff in future contests.

IsraelRN · Post by **IsraelRN** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 6:23 pm

Yes i agree with many of the ideas here, hopefully after this contest we can arrange to have regular monthly-or-something contests with different rules, maybe sticking to a theme/question or using a given soundtrack, maybe one contest for animation with no bones, and maybe even a yearly contest where we can submit anything as long as it's done with AS.

Just some ideas...

Regards,
Israel RN

Touched · Post by **Touched** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 6:57 pm

Well, another good argument in favour of a time limit is to encourage more entries. I've seen contests where people get too ambitious, try to make something big, but find out too late that there's not enough time to finish it, and thus give up and don't enter anything.

As for the movie format, since AS exports Quicktime directly, I'll happily use that. What program would people recommend for converting an AVI file to .divx, though?

New Contest Coming Soon!

Contest Posted - Please give final review

duration

contests