Hi,

All the entries were great. All 4. Power to all 4 of you for making the effort! Shame on myself for not.

I'll commit right now for the next movie contest. I'll take the time and make the effort. Can't seem to win image contest LOL so, maybe I'll be the only entry in the next movie contest and win by default!

Cheers,
Rusty

Mark your calendar now rusty. MMC will be back in January. I am going to hold off til then due to the holidays coming up and people also working on TWO. I hope you will remain interested.

anyone know what it will need to be about? To get started early, you know. lol

Typically these contest is not theme oriented. You put together an animation and submit it on the deadline.

Count me in on the next MMC. What is the usual time frame given from the time it is posted until the time that it is due?

Al

I am going to give two month deadlines for the next contest.

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Putting a 'theme' on the contest will really limit the storys people will be able to come up with. Given the number of entries last time I don't think we need to add any 'limits' LOL.

Rusty

I was going over the rules and regulations for the last MMC, and did not really see anything about what software you can use. In the image contests, it says to use only A:M with the exception being a paint program for textures and things like that.

Obviously, the modelling and animation will be done in A:M, but can other software be used for putting the final video together (e.g. Sony Vegas NLE, sound editing programs, Particle Illusion, etc.)?

My mind is racing with possible ideas, and just want to make sure that I don't disqualify myself before I even get started. Being new to A:M, this is going to take me a long time, so I would like to get a head start on something. Which also makes me hope for no theme...

Thanks...
Al

Just for the record, in the last contest my entry was done in A:M, but the titles were done in Sony Vegas Movie Studio. As I understand the rules, as a minimum the modeling and animation must be done in A:M, but Leo is the final word on this.

Scott

All modeling and animation must be done in A:M but post production (ie titles, edits, transitions and such) may be done in an outside program. HOWEVER, if you are doing live-action compositing then you must use A:M for that as well.

Great!

Thanks Leo...

Al

No problem Al. Glad to be of help, after all that's what I am here for.

My entry was 100% A:M for all visuals. (Audio was done with Audacity and N-Track Studio.) There was no post-processing or editing involved.

For the opening titles, I created an empty choreography, and created a single object using the font wizard with all the text. I rendered it to a file, including alpha channel. Then I created a rotoscope on the camera, chose the graphic I had just rendered, selected the rotoscope to always be on top, and set it's transparency to 100%, lowered it to 0% to display, then raised it to 100% again to make it disappear. I was very happy with this approach.

For the closing credits, I had the font wizard text objects in the same chor as the rest of the set, just way off to the side. A black plane for the background, and 2 models that contained the text of the closing credits, both of which had glow or luminosity or whatever it's called set up high so I didn't need additional lighting. At the end of the chor time range, I just moved the camera to point just above the credits, and then had the camera pan down at a constant rate. In retrospect, I could have used a similar approach as with the opening titles, using the rotoscope offset to do the scrolling.

If you don't count the first chor for creating the opening titles, the entire animation was done with a single choreography.