11 Second Club – October Competition

I participated in the 11 second club competition in October!  Wohoo! Here’s my entry.

It was my first one in a veeeeery long time! Tried out a complete different approach than I am used to. Was fun!

Ended up with a 4.86 point and on 60 place out of 213 entries. It’s not good, but it’s my best this far. Still have a lot to work on!

Oh, and here are some thoughts about my animator self:

I’ve come to the conclusion I need to work a lot more on my animation skills. I’m not good enough.

Sure, I’ve been working as a game animator for 4 years now, but I was more of a multi-task-game-artist. Comes with working in a small team/company, am I right? 🙂

I was lucky to get to make all the animation, rigging and effects for our games, but when I was needed elsewhere I also scripted, made 3D art assets, lead a smaller team, designed pipelines etc. It’s been awesome, fun, challenging, evolved me as a developer – but my role as an animator often came second place.

Since we were a small team with huge ambitions and tight release dates I worked with this mindset: How do I make this look good enough as quick as possible? What can I reuse from old animations? How can I animate more cycles in a day?

Pretty good mind set if you want to stay productive and make cool games that update often with as few people as possible. But not a very good mind set if you want to improve.

The fault is partly mine, though. These years I have barely touched animation in my spare time. Comics and illustration was all I did in my spare time. And at work, I took on too much work and responsibility in other fields, giving me less time be able to polish my animation tasks. And I completely sucked at deligating work in crunch periods (“This task is mine… mine minE MINE!” – “Uh, since when were you so passionate about modeling tanks?”). Childish, I know. 🙂

That was a long rant. Anyway, expect to see more animation from me! Give me feedback if you want, I’d appreciate it! I’m trying to make something in Flash for the November competition. Way out of my comfort zone, it’s a lot of fun!

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