After last years triumphant effort we agreed to offer another helping hand to this years global event – Twestival Local. Given that ‘local’ has connotations of collaboration, we decided that 30-second stop-frame animation sting would be the perfect medium. Stop-frame is my first passion, as some of you will know, as I spent the first 5 years of my professional career animating on children’s series for TV.

Working with Amanda, Crystal and Leynete is always such a joy, this year we had the added spin of having to find someone who could make us an original origami ‘Twestival’ bird and Sam Tsang kindly stepped in to help us, (his website is here). First of all he went off and fine tuned the type of bird we were looking for and then he helped us understand the process on how it is made.

Because of our client commitments at Sliced Bread, it was very hard for us to give as much time as stop-frame needs. We provided the equipment/ materials and enlisted the help of some current students and graduates, to get the production done. Georgie, Charlie, Hannah and David all kindly gave up a week of their time to come to our studio and animate. Georgie and Charlie have provided an insight into the experience below. Special thanks to those who gave a ‘hand(s)’ during the weekend shoot too – Adam (@wrongcrowd), Jo (@joellybaby), Carmen, Natalie and Christina.

This year Twestival is going ‘Local’ in cities around the world on Thursday 24 March 2011. Events for Twestival Local will raise funds and awareness for local nonprofits that organizers identify for having an incredible impact within their own community.

The events can be as big or small as the city wants to make it. We have had Twestivals in a local pub, a bowling alley, a trapeze studio, and even a giant yacht, all thanks to the generosity of local donors and sponsors who come forward to support the volunteer efforts. It is about using your time, talent and resources to come together on one night to make a difference. Think global, act local.

Georgie Cobbs

Working on this Twestival project for Sliced Bread throughout the past 7 days has been exhausting yet definitely exciting. The prospect of a creating a stop-frame animation from start to finish in just a week definitely had its problems but putting together all of our resources and creative minds (and some sweets) everything got resolved calmly. It was incredibly inspiring to be spending the week in a place, bursting with creativity, like Shoreditch is. Animating paper and origami birds definitely had its hurdles and restrictions due to how fragile they are but we found a way to simply rig them and animate their movements convincingly.

Big thanks to Jamie Denham for giving four students/graduates the opportunity to be involved in such a wide-spread project and giving us the freedom to be creatively responsible and also to all the participants who were kind enough to give up their Saturday afternoon to volunteer their hands for the project.

Charlie

Oh my goodness! Where do I start?! I’d sum up the total experience as something like concept to animation in 6 days,fighting with blue tack, making and fixing mistakes we didn’t have time to make, pecking at grapes and MAMOM sweets while waiting for camera batteries to charge. For myself, the beginning started with high levels of excitement to be involved in a live project within the creative industry. The icing on the cake was that I’d be spending a week in the amazingly creative Shoreditch area. Nerves were normal as usual, as I was curious about how animating with 3 other individuals was going to turn out! It ended with a well deserved 30minute break on Sliced Breads amazing roof garden terrace, laughing joyously & hysterically (probably a result of sleep deprivation) at ourselves & the whole entire week with the amazing David Steed & Georgie Wright (Hannah you were there in spirit).

Awesome shout out to Sliced Bread’s head honcho, Jamie Denham, for giving students/ recent graduates the opportunity to get involved!

Trafalgar Origins – Channel 4 from Preloaded on Vimeo.

Following on from their success with 1066 The Game, Preloaded have launched Trafalgar Origins which was also commissioned by Channel 4 Education. Sliced Bread Animation also had a part in this production, creating some of the in-game assets; namely the ships rolling states (including the damaged states plus furled/ unfurled), the sail simulations, explosions and barrel rolls. Jon at Poked Studios partnered on the project to assist with the character design.

The most complex part to our assignment was creating a workflow for the rolling states of ships (sail open, closed, damaged etc.) which had to cover every direction permutation. As a best practice approach, we built all 3 ships as 3D assets and created a toon-like shader to not only keep within the look of the overall design, but also to have better control over the required simulations. We then set-up a Maya’s inherent dynamic system to control the sail shapes.

“Trafalgar Origins is a game commissioned by Channel 4 Education for the Bloody Foreigners season to be broadcast in June 2010, supporting the Hardy Pictures production of Battle of Trafalgar. The game has been created by Preloaded, the same studio responsible for Channel 4’s award-winning game 1066.

“We’ve created an educationally robust, casual game that combines the energy and drama of 19th Century naval warfare with the social context and human history that underpins the Channel 4 season. The history has provided a backdrop for a rich and dramatic gaming experience which will resonate strongly with the target audience.”

Phil Stuart, Creative Director, Preloaded

It is the first game to use Channel 4 Educations new Facebook Connect component.

Here’s an animation we have just completed for Twestival Global (2010)... see twestival.com for more details. There’s a blog post coming up shortly, which details more about the collaboration process (which was a fantastic experience), but for now we wanted to get it out there and promote the cause.

Creative: Crystal English, Leynete Cariapa, Animation: Sliced Bread, Music: EliasArts, Audio: Green-Shoot, Recorded at Dammit Ltd., Voice: Lawrence Sheldon, Twestival Bird: 383 Project, Video Footage: charity: water, Thanks to What Talent Ltd., Produced by Connect the Dots Foundation, Photography Courtesy of National Geographic (c) James P. Blair/ National Geographic, Gabriele Gaspardis, Justin Sangani, Brooks Walker/ National Geographic, Johannes Ehrhardt, James P. Blair/ National Geographic images

What is Twestival™?

On Thursday 25 March 2010, people in hundreds of cities around the world will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness.  Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good.  All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.  If you would like to get involved, please Register your City, Register your School, or Volunteer and we will get in touch.  Organizers will be given a handbook and invitation to our collaboration workspace.  Follow @twestival for updates.

Argos have recently launched this Sliced Bread created game (client: Meteorite) to coincide with their ‘Toy Tester for Year‘ competition and ‘Big Play’ Roadshows. The game has 3 competency zones, each with 4 playable levels. Players can also invite their friends to join them in mini high scoreboards. You can play the game here.

I’m Angus and this is my awesome Toy Testing factory. It’s my job to make sure all the toys are off the Fun-o-meter scale! But there are so many great toys here, I need another Toy Tester to help me. So let’s see if you’re up to the job. Collect as many toys as possible from the Big Play Area zones – the clock is ticking!

Good day today plenty of progress made, Z800 machine running well couple of issues with encoding audio via Premiere CS4, seems to be a software issue though not the machine. Most of the shots are now planned through, story just needs a little tightening against the new voice-over.

As some of you know we are involved in a competition for HP called the ‘Mr Z Designer Challenge‘ (more info here). Yesterday the machine arrived just before lunch, and we busied ourselves loading the software in and adding plug-ins ensuring that we could comfortably start production.

From an initial observation the HP Dream Colour monitor is amazing, the colours are showing very vibrant and rich against our normal monitors and it doesn’t seem to reflect the outside light so much either. The Z800 machine itself is quite compact for sooo much power, its also very quiet! Working in Maya we haven’t noticed a massive change in speeding up the workflow (yet) compared to our normal machines, but we ran a few test on the rendering last night and it is comparably faster.

From a production perspective, it has been agreed with all studios, that all sequences will be kept closely under wraps until all they are all put together. A couple of frames from our storyboard are shown below but that doesn’t really give away much! Last week we worked on some preparation including the story and also rigging the character, so that we can get the animation we require during our week.

Caroline Hampstead – Copywriter (www.carolinehampstead.com) has kindly written a voice-over for us and Green-Shoot (www.green-shoot.com) has provided the voice recording (more on the voice-over artist and sound FX later). We will try and blog progress on a daily basis, so check back back here for regular updates . . .

I find Twitter a great resource for information relating to the industry, the bite-size stream can quickly pull you in quickly to interesting links. The extract below came from original source:

“A video is 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results than any other content. It is therefore imperative for every product, brand, and marketing campaign to have a social video element.”

Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, Vquence’s CEO and former CSIRO research scientist

In addition, other social video networks such as MySpace.TV, Dailymotion, or Vimeo should also be included in marketing campaigns since their audiences are more focused and a video can thus reach its target more easily.

Thanks to @lilipip for the link reference

@stephenfry (via @ninjaboi) tweeted this earlier today, so twotally twool you’ll love twit!

Full link here:  Super News Twouble with Twitters

The other day I was having a discussion with a friend of mine, she’s a journalist, and we were re-living the old days of typesetting with the subsequent conversion to computer based publishing and how technology had moved on in only 18 years. Attitudes to technology are so ‘matter of fact’ these days,  it has to be ready here and now. It is especially prevalent in photography, digital photography has stormed the scene with everyman and his dog claiming their place. I can buy a relatively cheap DSLR camera, take ‘quality’ pictures upload them to my site (and revenue generating stock photography sites) and get professional print runs sent straight to my door. But in the same instance, just because I can use Maya, does that make me an animator?

Indeed server side encoding is the way forward with YouTube, Vimeo etc., especially now that YouTube are offering a download service (by public demand). Being able to to universally distribute content should be a given, not a challenge. Media encoders like Squeeze or Cleaner XL make the job of us filmmakers very simple to use, create your ‘video’ piece in whatever format and away you go; mobile, Flash, QuickTime, iPhone its all there for the taking. Just drag and drop, sometimes you have to fiddle with the data rate but that’s about it.

In animation, rendering times need to be quicker, the production pipelines need to be slick and the output, universal. When we were commissioned by Sony for Trona in 2004, top of the list was ensuring that we could maintain delivery of a 30-second episode every week for 24 weeks. We developed a pipeline that ensured it could happen, recognising also that we also needed to build bespoke tools to help us. Also, when Sony requested assets for print and plasma screens etc., we couldn’t afford to fold under the pressure. Fortunately it was all available for use within the campaign, assets for print, assets for plasma screens, assets for banners, screen-savers, you name it it was ready and available without any disruption to the production process.

In the present day, audiences demand access to much more content with much more choice, gone are the days when you could roll out an episode once a week, to launch an animated product you need a batch of episodes, especially if you are launching online. Even 5 years ago when we first launched Trona, the campaign didn’t start well as there weren’t any other episodes to view, however when had a batch of about 6 or 7.. viewers started hanging around longer, averaging 6-minutes, that’s 6-minutes in front of Sony product – you don’t get that in TV advertising!

Recently Sliced Bread worked on a (soon to be released) game for Channel 4. To give the game depth and maintain audience engagement we had to produce nearly 300 sequences of animated scenarios  in 2-weeks for the agency who developed and designed the game. With early planning we looked at the pipeline to ensure we could deliver on-time whilst also meeting client expectations creatively.

When we consider any project now moving forward, we always look at what value can we bring and how can we reduce the pressure on the production. Working in digital marketing needs swift and very forward thinking. There is an incredible demand in our sector to produce high-quality content in a very short space of time. It is also important to let the client know what extras they can get out of the content you create.

Social media marketing is fast becoming a defining area, in Dan Light’s blog he talks about the development of the Watchmen widget and the ultimate requirement of creating a component that needed a sufficient rotation of content to make it work as a ‘social media’ piece.

The bottom line is this – if you’re going to ask somebody to place what is essentially a free advertisement for your product on their homepage, blog, fan-site, social networking profile or whatever other digital smallholding it is they call their own, you better make sure it does something.  In the case of WATCHMEN, content-wise, we really went for the mother lode.

Coming into 2009, we took the widget and turned it into the centrepiece of what we can find no better words to describe than ’social media toolkit’.

Digital marketing is a very exciting space right now, with ‘social media marketing’ being this years watch-word. The global change is also relevant our industry as it now requires collaboration, accountability and transparency. However understanding production workflows, so that you can ensure the creative process becomes unhindered, is also very important in delivering engaging content to target markets who demand choice.