Post Pupal Perils

Here's a rundown of the Animation Contest...

eD and some of his friends entered a 300 hour animation contest (end of Feb/early March).  They had 12 days to create an animated short out of a theme, character, and object supplied the start date from the contest via email.  They recieved their criteria on Feb 23rd which was Theme - Aging, Character - a Mother, Object - a Bottle.  By the next day they had decided on a final idea, which was a Mother Fly teaching her Maggot children the rules to live a healthy life to, and it just so happened to take place inside of a bottle.  

eD spent the next few days fleshing out the idea, working on designs for the characters.  He spent about 2-3 days on character models and rigs while waiting on final script.  He had the fly almost finished and the Maggot models rigged when his friends Rich and Dave came over to help him with the script, as well as coercing him out of the house with the promise of Thai food.  After dinner we recorded voices for the short.  A few different versions of each, giving many people chances for their interpretations of the characters. 

They started working with the scratch audio on March 1st setting up shots, trying to get an edit set so they could determine shot lengths, and get the audio timed for lipsync.  Some animation was started on the 2nd of March (the first and second shots since they could be placed in the edit without much hassle), but most of the shots weren't blocked until the 3rd of March.  The deadline was the 6th so there was only a few 24 hr days to animate 42 shots, so they decided to cut 10 shots to save themselves some work.  Since eD wanted to get ahead of things 4 of the shots that were cut were already animated, but that happens all the time in production.  There were many sleepless nights at the beginning of this project, which turned into sleepless days (plural).  eD finished animating a few hours into the afternoon of the deadline day, but they were still not able to get all the renders finished, shots comped, and edited together in time to submit for the contest.  If they would have been given three more hours, I believe it would have been submitted, but I was just there drinking beers and rooting them on.