Help for new animation teams

[DaveC]

New animation teams, do you want help getting your project organized and completed and uploaded on time?

Completing your submission will involve lots of tasks that don't involve 3DS Max - identifying and selecting your story, storyboarding, creating asset lists, time (frame) budgeting, writing voice-overs, creating an animatic, collecting reference images and sound effects, laying-down the soundtrack, rendering & video-post, etc., etc. (OK, those last two are 3DS Max but they're different from modeling and animating.) And all that is on top of grappling with 3DS Max. It can be daunting.

THE VISION
Team 250 invites you to participate in weekly web-casts of our Thursday night meetings starting January 12th. (Additional web-casts may be added if there's a demand.) We want to help you through your production process by showing how we do it. We don't plan to do 3DS Max instruction - there's plenty on the web - but we can answer a question or two.

What we WILL do is provide you with a weekly to-do list and a project timeline. We'll show you how we brainstorm and storyboard. We'll show you how we combine still images from the storyboard into an animatic (we'll show you what an animatic is). We'll show you how we do the audio (voice-over and sound effects) using "Audacity". We'll show you how we render our animation and create the MOV file with our audio track.

THE AUDIENCE
Any and all are welcome but it's new teams who'll benefit the most. Veteran teams will most likely have found their own solutions to these challenges. We're looking to help those teams who might otherwise give up in frustration.

THE MECHANICS
We'll be using Adobe Connect Pro (access graciously provided by Excelsior College, Albany NY) to broadcast our sessions and you'll be able to connect from your browser. (You'll probably need some sort of broadband connection.) It will be a live video feed starting around 7:45 PM Eastern Time and ending around 9:00 PM (that's 00:45-02:00 UTC). We'll be sharing out our desktop(s) and you'll be able to post messages to a chat window that will be monitored throughout the meeting. I'll email the sessions' URL to anyone who wants to participate - you can email me at d.coveney@team250.org or send me a private message on Chief Delphi. The sessions will be recorded and each will be viewable at its own URL. I'll send you those too.

THE WHY
I want to boost the number of animations submitted and I suspect there are teams that just give up for lack of help and support. Maybe this will help.

Dave Coveney
Animation Mentor
TEAM 250