First official Spungella Animation Contest

Contest is over, thanks a lot for participating!
You can vote for your favorite clip here: spungellacontest.blogspot.com
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Alright! Here we go! The topic is:

GUILTY
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Welcome to the first official Spungella Animation Contest!

Why a contest? Let me backtrack and explain a bit:

When I started with the first blog I also added those pesky Google Adsense advertisements. I was intrigued by the financial potential and if you have a big site with a lot of good content updates, it can be very lucrative. Animation is pretty specialized, it's not like I have a site about house mortgages, religion or something similar which attracts a lot of interest, so the money I make is minimal. But still, it can average out to $30 a month. Pocket change you might say, but to me, that's my monthly web and domain hosting bill. Sometimes I make more, sometimes less, but it's all coming from visitors clicking on those ads. So after all that time, I wanted to reward the people who click on those. Not that I know who does, but at least I wanted to take some of that "free" money and do something useful and fun with it. And why not use it to fund a prize for an animation contest and give back that way?

So here we are. Hopefully the first of many contests to come (in whatever shape or form). I talked already about it (see here), but let's explain and outline all the aspects of this contest:

• Challenge: create a shot or sequence based on a specific topic using only 100 frames within one week
• Medium: whatever you want
• The topic will be announced this Sunday, April 25th, at midnight. So technically Monday super early morning on the 26th. :)
• Hand in your work on Monday, May 3rd. Send me the movie file either as an attachment or via a link so I can download it.

You can check out examples of this kind of exercise here and here.

I will not be providing any type of feedback within that time frame. You will have to go from shot idea to final polished end result on your own within a week (peer feedback is fine of course).

Please use a commonly used codec. A quicktime file with an h.264 compression for instance would be great. Render the animation big enough, around 800x600 (widescreen format is fine too of course). Please don't send something like 40x30 or 4000x3000.
If you work in 3D, any rig is fine. You can find free online rigs at Animation Buffet.
You can add sound if you want to as well.

You can do pretty much whatever you want to. Just keep it to 100 frames, no more. Include a frame counter in your submission.
And stay on topic. So let's say the topic is "Nervous", don't have a guy being super relaxed reading a book. The interpretation of the topic can be pretty open though. So if it would be "Dying", then it doesn't have to be just about characters dying. A cell phone signal dying works too. If you have any questions about the topic, just email me.

Ok, what do you win??

• First prize is an Art-of Book of your choice. I will buy it and ship it anywhere.

As pointed out in the comments already, I'm thinking of Art-of Books like the ones available on Amazon for instance, which hover around the $50 area. I'm open to other ones of course, but a $400 Pixar: 20 Years of Animation book is not exactly realistic. I was expecting common sense, hahaha! But I guess my wording really leaves it open to everything. So there, be realistic. Don't find some crazy rare book on ebay or whatnot. :)

• Second prize is a pose able Professor Layton figure.
• Third prize is the book How to be like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life
  (provided by Vvek Suvarna, thanks!!)

Who decides that?

At first, I will put up all the entries and there will be a poll where everybody can vote for their favorite clip. We will narrow it down to the top 5. After that I will select the winning three entries.

That should be all. If you have any questions, leave a comment or email me and I will update this post.

Cheers and good luck!!
JD