Yesterday, me and Luka went to Kingston, Ontario for the qualifying round of the Skills Canada animation competition. It's this thing we have in Canada that I've been doing a few years where high school students from around the country get a few hours to make animations based on a theme of some sort, and there are different rounds in different places, and it's pretty fun.

So yesterday was the qualifying round (the lowest level) and we came in first. Rather than being given a theme, we were given a sound clip instead and we had a few hours to make an animation about that. Here's the video we made (the only sound in the video is the sound clip we were given):

I think the quality of the animation improved from last year, especially for Luka (the first half of the video was animated by him), who has come a long was since last year, and especially since we weren't allowed to install our tablet drivers like we are in other levels of the competition. We're definitely proud of this video for that. Also I think we had a better focus on what we had to do, so there was more time spent on animating the character speaking, for example, than animating cool explosions or something. But anyway, we came in first with that video, so we are advancing to the provincial level in Waterloo, Ontario in a few weeks. I'll report back after that happens.

Also, in case you missed it (which is pretty easy since it's not very visible anywhere), I made an entry for the NATA open round. You can see it here on Newgrounds or you can watch it on Youtube:

It's in 3D, mostly, which is new. As has been pointed out repeatedly, there's not much there in terms of story or character development. This is largely because couldn't make models with working faces in time, which seriously limits the kinds of stories I can try to tell and the depth I can go into. I won't make you think or anything after you watch it. However, I am glad I made it, because I feel a lot more comfortable working in 3D now than I used to be. If I get through the open round and if I'm able to model characters decently enough by the next round of NATA, I'll try to make another one in 3D, but otherwise I might have to go back to 2D. It's also a competition, and I know that I can make better movies in 2D than I can in 3D, so I might have to leave learning 3D to my own time. I'm not really sure yet. We'll have to see.

Lastly, on the way back from Kingston, our bus broke down and we had to wait for a bit. I didn't have any games on my phone, but I did have a graphing calculator app, so naturally I made this: