Oh, wow! I didn't get all of these forum-only replies! Let me try to answer all the questions.
First, thank you very much for the compliments!
Music: The music is "The Chickens are Revolting" from John Powell & Harry Gregson-Williams'
Chicken Run soundtrack. Because the animation is for my church and I'm not getting paid for this, I am covered under "gratis use permission" of the music. However, considering this piece's great success and review, I'd like to use it to promote D.Joseph Design, enter in contests, and list on my website as more than just a "personal project." For that, I'm applying for commercial license of the music.
There are 1,914 rubber duckies in the animation. These are not simulated with special trick-videography, and they aren't calculated by a flock. All 1,914 rubber duckies are "individually animated" meaning each one exists in the choreography as an individual model-copy with it's own action. I can select and ducky and do whatever I want with it. The choreography file is 5 MB uncompressed and contains nearly 90,000 lines of code. Unless I'm wrong, I believe I hold the record for the most individually animated models in a single choreography.
Combined total for render time was 1,100 hours rendered by Mike Ulrich with
RenderMuscle. Half of that time is re-rendering an eight-second section at 9x multipass where single-pass motion-blur just didn't cut the peanut butter.
This took about 300 hours to model, animate, test, time, compile, and place.
Are the duckies symbolic of anything? No. It was just a crazy idea my father and I had after getting sugar-high from ice cream and watching a movie with my mother(sorry, I can't remember the movie).
I am rather pleased with the camera movement. There are a couple flaws, but you wouldn't catch them unless I point them out to you.
Concerning the squeak. I decided against the constant squeak because it just got so annoying after much longer than I already had. Fading out just didn't seem to work because the duckies were still
right there.
BTW, that Camera2 scene at ground-level with the marching sound was inspired by old World War II movies that showed marching troops' feet down the ranks.
Last year's opening animation? That was my first A:M project! This is my seventh animation. That's including little title sequences I did for last year's video.
So what's next? Sleep. After that, I'm working on some fun ideas that involve less than 20 models.
I'm working on a thorough document on how I did the animation. If for no other good, at least it gives me something else to put on my website.
As of 11:53 PM EST, Thursday, February 5, I have had 596 unique visitors to my website, and over 3.4 gigs transferred since I announced the animation Thursday morning, January 29. Half of those numbers were the first two days after announcing the animation just to some friends and the Animaster Mailing List.
Anything I missed?
