Earlier this week, I participated in the provincial 2D Character Animation competition for Skills Ontario in Waterloo. We were given the prompt "it happened all at once" and we made this video:
My partner and I ended up getting seventh, and we will not be advancing to the next round.
This was pretty disappointing for me for a few reasons. Firstly, we came third at the national level the year before, and everyone expected us to come back even stronger this year. There was an enormous amount of pressure to succeed, and a corresponding amount of feelings of failure when we didn't. Secondly, animation is pretty much the only thing I'm any good at, and I'll admit that it really hurt when we didn't even place. I mean, it's not like we came second and narrowly missed advancing to the next round. We came in seventh, which was unexpected.
When I try to analyze it, I think that maybe it had something to do with the cartoon violence in our movie, which may not have been acceptable at this particular venue. It could have had to do with our dull colour scheme and our lazy backgrounds. I'll admit the limited palette worked much better with the vibrant reds we used in our last video at the Skills Ontario regional level than it did with the boring blues and purples in this one. It might have had to do with the fact that the frame-by-frame was a bit sloppy, but that was still better than the frame by frame in last year's, which fared significantly better. It also could have had to do with the bad sound editing, but we had little time and we only had a microphone and Audacity (plus we were in the middle of a very large and noisy room with hundreds of people.) Okay, so I got defensive and tried to explain why those last two points might not be valid, but I still know in the back of my mind that excused won't help. Frankly, I'm still a bit confused as to why it didn't do so well, but the past's the past, and I guess I have no choice but to simply move on to the next thing and make the most of this. If you want, you can offer constructive criticism of the movie so that I can make a better one next year, because then I can get something positive out of the situation.
So now my time is pretty much free since I won't be on any more trips for anything. I'm glad I finished my entry to the NATA open round (which can be seen here) early, though, because when I got back my motivation level was zero. This whole experience was sort of a turnoff from animation for a day or two. Now, however, I think I'm past that stage. I think I'm at the point where, instead of feeling like a victim of some sort, I feel like I want to pull back into the game and prove myself. I expect that when the next round of NATA starts, if I make it through to round 2, I'm going to put even more effort into it than before. That's one good result of this for sure. I just think that I probably won't be able to make something that's very funny for it because I guess I am no longer in a very funny mood, so expect something with a bit more meaning behind it next (like my video Masquerade did) if I do make it through and if the theme permits it.
So that's all I have to say for now. I guess you can't win at everything. Life will carry on as normal. Hopefully I'll learn from this experience.
Thanks for being here when I need you, Newgrounds!
-Dave
DingoWalleyStudio
Oh, everyone has their failures and their mistakes. The important thing is to make sure you learn something from them. Your work is amazing dude XD Just because you didn't do well in one video doesn't mean you shouldn't get bummed XD In fact, I just recently had to cancel one of my works due to Legal Issues, but at least I learned a valuable lesson from it (Don't work with Copyright Material anymore XD).
Regardless, I look forward to more work from you dude :3 Your NATA cartoon was awesome.
Pahgawk
Yeah... there's definitely some merit to the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I'll be moving on soon, and hopefully whatever comes next will be better.
Thanks!