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!

We are proud to be supporting @twestival again this year with some more animated content to help them promote the event, this years theme is ‘local’. Its great to back with team (Amanda Rose, Crystal English and Leynete Cariapa) and this years creative will have a stop-frame feel, which is all very exciting! The event is on the 24th March 2011 – maybe we’ll see you there?

In the meantime, here’s a short piece about Twestival’s local impact using Miriam’s Kitchen as case study (created by ShineOn Storytelling), its definitely worth a view if you want to know more about the event and the help it provides for some extremely worthy causes.

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.

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 . . .