24 hour animation contest
Collaborating with a team of diverse skill sets to create a high-quality animation in 24 hours, balancing creativity, communication, and teamwork under intense time constraints.
This was one of my favorite projects of all time. Nothing is more rewarding than working with a truly quality team, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to work with these four talented and passionate artists. It’s projects like these that remind me how much I love what I do.
The 24 Hour Animation Contest challenges teams of five to conceptualize, design, and produce a 30-second animated short—all within just 24 hours. This year’s prompt was “Flip Your Perspective.” Our team embraced the pressure and transformed the theme into a cohesive story through collaboration, creativity, and quick problem-solving.
It’s important to note that everyone contributed in some way to every step of this film’s creation. From offering critiques and encouragement to grabbing food for a teammate, every member played HUGE role. The team was incredibly communicative, supportive, and efficient throughout the entire process.
The breakdown below chronicles our animation’s creation, from concepting to finalizing.
My wonderful team:
Dani Mason: https://danidarkarts.wixsite.com/home
Natalie Elliott: https://www.instagram.com/nelli_art_etc/?igsh=MWVsOG5kcW4yMWphYQ%3D%3D#
Kyler Despres: https://www.instagram.com/kylo_tc_art/
Anais Adjahi:
Timeline: 24 Hours (October 4th)
(breakdown pictured below)
Tools
Role
Audition
Premiere
After Effects
Garageband (MIDI)
Sound Design
Compositing
Editing & Animatic
How can we..
build and execute a clear production pipeline to maintain organization, communication, and creative focus under the intense pressure of a 24 hour animation sprint?
01 - ideation & concept art
Conceptually, we knew our animation had to do three things.
Align in some way with the given prompt.
Be compact enough to be both interesting, and feasible within the 24-hour timeframe.
Ideated and planned in a way that leverages and takes advantage of all our individual skillsets.
We did all of our ideation on a physical whiteboard, jotting down random ideas and concepts along the way.
(Concept board)
Since we decided to handle lines and coloring for animation separately, I proposed adding a digital line boil during final compositing to mimic a stylized, traditional jitter effect, achieving a hand-drawn look without adding extra work or time during animation.
We were ahead of schedule after ideation, and during that time, our character designer, Natalie, was already hard at work bringing our cast to life!
Natalie’s rough concepts for our cast of characters.
Character Design: Cat
Our first character design, before coloring.
Character Design: DOG
Our second character design, before coloring.
Final Character Designs:
We were all super impressed by these. This work by Natalie really established the kind of visual world we were aiming to create. While these were being finalized, the script was being finished by Dani.
By: Natalie Elliott
While the script and character design’s were being finished, I was looking for, and creating sound effects for our animation.
Dani was working on the storyboards during this time:
02 - sound design & storyboard
Once the storyboards were done, I was able to set the duration of each scene, timing them by using relevant sounds. It was important that the animatic was completed quickly so animation could begin as soon as possible.
The sound design in the animatic was compiled in Audition, and each track has very few effects on it. This was done to optimize time, as at any point in the future I could tinker with the sound. The rendered track from Audition was then taken into Premiere and timed accordingly.
Shortly after the storyboards were completed, and I was working on Sound Design, Anais and Kyler were hard at work on the backgrounds.
The workflow we chose for backgrounds was similar to the plan for animation. Kyler would work on lines, while Anais would color everything.
Here’s a quick stylistic moodboard they put together for reference:
03 - backgrounds
With these style references in mind, Kyler began drawing the lines for the backgrounds. After he completed one, Anais would color it, and so on.
Backgrounds took much longer than expected, but they turned out absolutely incredible, and they were well worth the wait. Kyler and Anais absolutely killed it!
Lined backgrounds:
By: Kyler Despres
Colored Backgrounds:
For interior spaces, we decided to have a line-less style, while the outside would feature heavy linework.
By: Anais Adjahi
Our line animation was created entirely by Dani, who did an absolutely phenomenal job. Dani followed the animatic with pinpoint precision while also bringing incredible speed. The entire line animation process was completed in under eight hours.
o4 - animation
Line Animation:
By: Dani Mason
Color Animation
By: Natalie Elliott, Dani Mason, Anais Adjahi, Kyler Despres
.
o5 - compositing
Our compositing was done by myself. While everyone else was working on coloring the line animation, I was setting up the backgrounds in After Effects.
Since our story was to take place in the rain, I had to devise a way to create convincing rain effects. This meant that I needed to create at least four original effects that can be applied to any and all scenes that required them.
(I didn’t have access to plugins, thus all effects were created natively)
The first was creating the rain itself.
The second was creating the reaction of the rain hitting the ground.
The third was creating the soft rain wrap around the character.
The fourth was creating an effect that indicates the character has been in the rain.
All we needed were simple effects that fit the style and did the job. Low complexity, high adaptability.
Selling the Environment: Effects
By: Matt Schmidt
To better align with our animation, the effects such as the rain and its interactions were rendered at a reduced frame rate of 12 FPS. This adjustment helps the effects feel as hand crafted and organic as the original animation.
Using these elements individually, or all together on a scene-by-scene basis allowed for a great amount of control over atmosphere of the film.
Compositing Breakdown
By: Matt Schmidt
This was our film’s “hero shot” in my opinion, it perfectly encapsulated the style we were going for. It seamlessly blended the animation and backgrounds, and the compositing and sound only enhanced it further.
The line boil in particular paid dividends, adding stylized motion for little leg work.
The 24 hour animation contest is always an absolute blast, no matter the outcome. I’m so thankful that this year I got to share the experience alongside such a talented and passionate team.
I want to extend my gratitude to the Digital Art and Design faculty at KCAD for preparing and hosting such a memorable event. As well as my absolutely incredible team, it was an unforgettable experience from start to finish.
Good work, INKSOMNIACS. See you all next October!
06 - reflection
Art by: Anais Adjahi