Hey, this is my first news post ever! Does anyone read this?

Anyway. On to business. So I've been doing some cool animation stuff recently. In Canada, there is this thing called the "SkillsCanada" technical competition. Pretty much, people from all over the country (there's a high school category, which I'm in, and a post-secondary education category) go to compete in various skilled trade fields, ranging from robotics to welding to, you guessed it, animation.

What they do for the animation category is this: They give you a theme, a tablet, a microphone, some headphones, and a Windows 7 computer equipped with various software, and then they stick you in a room for a grand total of five hours (and feed you pizza every once in a while) so you can make your movie. Yup, that's five hours total. You are forced to stop after that.

So, in case you didn't know, I'm a high school student in Ottawa. So, my friend and I (we needed a team of two) got together to try this out. So, we first went to Kingston, Ontario for the regional competition and we came in first. Then, earlier this week, we went to Waterloo, Ontario for the provincial competition, and we won there too. By the way, here's the movie we made in Waterloo:

The theme was "Where am I?" and although they were supposed to supply us with legit music and sound effects, they didn't, so we had to make our own from scratch in Audacity using the "generate tone", "generate white noise" and a few other effects (which is time consuming and doesn't actually sound very good, by the way :P). But now we can officially say that we have bragging rights as the best high school animators in Ontario.

So, since we won, we're going to Quebec City at the end of this month for the national competition, where we actually get a full TWO days to make the movie instead of one!

I'll post some more updates after the fact!