[BuddyB309]

Heh, thanks to all who helped work on it. I honestly didnt know who was going to win cause they were all really really well done.

Its really funny how our animation came to be. I dream a lot and i was playing a lot of Neverhood. I originally had a dream about mechanical stuff comming out of a box and thought it would make a very good animation. I drew it down with colord pencil (the titile slate at the begining is the original concept drawing) and showed it to the team. They loved it and wanted to go head first into the project and not wait for the theam to come out. (yes this is happening before any of us knew the theme. We wanted to get done while the mechanical people were still in the design phase). When the theme came out all we had to do was change the voice over.

Createting the animation was very very easy and very very quick. We mainly used path deform and cones for everything. That is how we got the tree to grow. The colors that bleed out from the vines was done with a mask. First after we laid out the vines and where they would go i saved the file as a different file and made a camera looking strait down. Then we animated the radius of the cones to a ridiculous size and renderd the alpha channel. Then we used the alpha channel of the cones as the mask for the colors.

The trees bouncing are done with stretch modifier. We wanted the trees to have a little rubbery feel to them. The Mushrooms were created and animated by a freshmen. The only thing i did myself was the tree growing and some of the animation of the robotic arms.

The reason why we got this animation done so fast is because we locked ourselves in a room with no windows and no internet. So we had no distractions. One of the Freshmen is really good with networking and we set up a beautiful system of organizing our files. We saved all of our files on a shared external hardrive and one computer in the corner acted as a server. We must have spent an hour over a lesson on how we were going to save our files and what the names of our files were going to be. We were very organized.

The end credits were done entirely by the freshmen. I gave them a character that i had previously created and they decieded to use it into the credits. The "No more mountain dew for him" guy he refers too is actually a really funny story. One of the Freshmen decided to down 6-10 cans of mountain dew in 10 mins. Now this kid is normally very squirrly but when he got jacked up on mountain dew he was bounceing of the walls. It was really annoying at the time but now its a really funny story.

Our original music we wanted to use was Bittersweet Symphony from The Verv. NEVER NEVER base your animation off of a copyrighted music. We spent the rest of the time trying to get copyrights for the song and the company wanted $1,000 for it. So we had a friend of ours put together a sound alike. I think he did a very good job.

Lighting is very simple. Skylight with final gather renderd with mental ray. It was a fast job, normally an overnight render.