Yesterday I went to Kingston, Ontario for the regional level of the Skills Canada 2D Character Animation competition. In case you don't know, Skills Canada is a nationwide Canadian competition for skilled trades. Animation is one of its categories, in which teams of two are given topics and a day (or two, if it is at the national level) to create an animation. Usually, sound is a component, but at the regional level it isn't.

Long story short, me and my partner won, and you can see the video we made here:

The topic this year was "it was never going to be an ordinary day", which is significantly better than the one they gave us at this level last year ("your friend is being bullied. What do you do?") At least this time there is a lot more room for interpretation. The way the contest was organized made sure we created storyboards first, because they were worth 25% of the final mark for the video and we weren't allowed to touch the computers until the first hour was up. Once that was done, we had four hours to do everything else. Because of the nature of the competition (limited time, no sound, etc), I'm not uploading this is a flash on Newgrounds, but as far as these sorts of contests go, I'm proud of it. I think it turned out really well given the time we had. I'll be moving on to the provincial level in Waterloo at the end of this month.

Anyway, on the topic of Flash animation, I discovered another issue with Flash's quicktime exporter. It occasionally messes up the frame rate/keyframes on YouTube and other video uploading sites, causing stutter and the wrong frames being held. I eventually discovered I could make a much better export by writing a little script that makes a PNG sequence out of an SWF (including actionscripted sections such as the particles when the kid is vaporized in the above movie.) Then, using ffmpeg (a free command line video conversion tool), I could string together all the frames, plus an exported WAV from Flash if I wanted to use sound. Great quality, too. I think I'll eventually publicly release the image sequence editor I made along with a batch file with the ffmpeg commands used if there's enough interest.

Also, NATA (formerly TOFA) starts tomorrow. I'm going to be participating in that, as well as the guy who made the animation for Skills Canada with me. It's my first year participating, and it seems quite fun, especially given all the time we have for each round. Good luck to everyone else joining in!

-Dave