Hello!

My friend and I have entered a contest in Kansas City. The contest is to produce a 30 second commercial for a local radio station (98.9 The Rock). We spent about a month putting our entry together.  All of the background sets were created and rendered in Carrara Pro 5.

There are 9 total votes - 8 of them come from the DJ's, and the other single vote comes from online voting.

If you have a minute, please help us out and vote!
VOTE for #76

Go to this site and vote (left side of the page) for #76!
http://www.989therock.com/on-air/re...ting/index.html

If you want to see our commercial, go here:
http://www.989therock.com/on-air/re.../videos/76.html

Thanks for the help!

Chucker

Voted for you.  Great animation.  Checked out the competition and think you have a very good chance of winning. Keep us informed on how well you do.

Keith

loved it, i voted

Excellent and funny animation! You got my vote. Best of luck!

I thought that was great. Well done. Add another vote. BTW, i normally won't bother when some asks to vote for them in the forums. I made an exception in your case. Again, well done and good luck.

You have my vote too...

Quote - I thought that was great. Well done. Add another vote. BTW, i normally won't bother when some asks to vote for them in the forums. I made an exception in your case. Again, well done and good luck.

Thanks for all the help everyone, I really appreciate it. And normally I don't go fishing for votes in a forum either, but with online voting it's more about how many people you know with a computer than how good your work is. ;-) I'm not really expecting to win the online portion, but thankfully the other 8 votes come from the DJ's at the station. So hopefully talent and creativity will win in the end. I'll let you know how it turns out. Chucker

I model and I vote. ;)

Well, I looked at the 2 others with more votes. They aren't near as good as yours. I voted for ya. #79, right? (sorry couldn't resist).

voted... and I agree yours is better than the two I saw with more votes

Chucker,
Would love to hear more about the process that went in to making it.

Hear,Hear! Yeah, so would I. It was a very impressive and intertaining ani!

Quote - Chucker,
Would love to hear more about the process that went in to making it.

Thanks for all the great feedback from everyone!  How did we make it?  Here's a quick rundown:

After the concept, storyboard and script were in place, we broke up the workload.  My friend (Curt) is better at drawing than me, so he started creating the characters.  He posed and animated his figures in Poser, then rendered out frames as reference to draw his characters in ToonBoom.

As he was working on the characters, I started on the backgrounds.  I modeled a complete "Dojo" in Carrara and set individual cameras up for each shot.  I rendered them out at double size to allow for clean zooming and panning in After Effects.  After each background was rendered, I took it into Photoshop and "tinted" it an amber color with a preset action I created. 

After my backgrounds were done, I re-built the station's logo in Illustrator and imported it into the Spline Modeler.  I created the ending "cutting edge rock" with shapes created from the logo and a light cone.

As Curt would finish up characters for a shot, he would e-mail me the frames (usually 3-4 frames per movement) and I would import them into After Effects along with the background and build the shot.  This worked out really well, so that as I was compositing shots, he could continue working on the next shot.  Curt is in Kansas City and I am in Wichita, so we "met" every day via iChat to discuss the project. 

I created the music in Propellerhead's Reason software and all the sound effects came from a professional cd.  After all the shots were rendered out in After Effects, we did the final edit in Final Cut Pro.  I did make the trip up the KC so that we could do the final edit together, which saved a lot of time sending demo renders back and forth.  ;-)

We had such a good time and worked so well together, we decided to create a freelance partnership.  It's not "officially" online yet, but if you are curious to see some of our other work you can check it out here:  http://www.chromaghost.com/work.html  Most of the animation on the page was done in Carrara, which is what I use at my "real" day job.

Hope I didn't ramble too much... if you have any other questions about the production, feel free to ask!

Chucker

Just wanted to update those who were following this... we didn't win the contest. :-( Stupidity won over talent. Oh well... we had fun producing our commercial though and it looks good on our resume. :-) Thanks to all those who voted for us. If you come across a decent animation contest online - feel free to pass it along to me. Chucker

I'm sorry to hear that! I thought that your commercial was far and away the best of the entries that I saw. You and your partner keep doing what you're doing. Quality eventually gets noticed and cream rises to the top.

Yeah, well whether you won or not  you have a nice piece there and it will pay off somehow.

Well... they could have picked a worse one.  But then they could have picked a much better one like yours.  But they are probably lowering themselves to their listeners level.