Why?

Because 1 million dollars and Super Bowl-level exposure is at stake!

In addition, this year they are adding the opportunity to create a commercial with The Lonely Island! So you can imagine how competitive this contest is, and this year is no exception. Browse the gallery to get an idea of what’s out there, but you might have to do a lot of hunting to find the gems, but there are some really good ones. You can see all the finalists from the past here.

Here’s how the contest works:

• Judges will select the top 5 entries and announce them the beginning of January

• These 5 will receive $25k and a trip to the Super Bowl

• A public vote will determine one winner from these 5

• This one winner will be run as an advertisement for Doritos during this year’s Super Bowl

• If that winner’s commercial is chosen by USA Today (newspaper) as the best Super Bowl commercial, either on USA Today’s facebook page or using their AdMeter system, Dorito’s will give that winner 1 million dollars. If they are second then $600k, and third is $400k.

So 1 million dollars seems like a long shot, right?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Out of the 5 years they have operated this contest they have awarded the million dollar prize twice!

I have entered this contest two years ago, you can see that unsuccessful entry here. This year I didn’t want to hold back so after a mild brain aneurysm I thought of a decent idea, ran it by my friend Eric, who made it even better, then I started storyboarding it.

Let me apologize in case you're incredibly intimidated by the unmitigated talent I display at drawing stick figures, I can't help it. Also, it's pricey, but not a bad app for your iPhone, this cinemek thingy.

Then I began designing my dinosaur! I wanted a velociraptor so I did a litte research and rewatched Jurassic Park 1 and 2 for design, as well as reference for the animation. After creating the base mesh in Maya, I used Zbrush to finish off the model:

I am concurrently trying to finish up my student short film, so I didn’t have a ton of time for this project. For example, after I got the base mesh for the dinosaur done, I spent one day and completely finished modeling, texturing, and rigging this character. It was the fastest I’ve been able to work on anything, I think, just because of the time constraint I placed on myself. For that same reason, I feel I could have done better with some more time.

Also, to be efficient with my time, both dinosaurs are the exact same rig and model. Therefore, my one constraint, besides simplicity, was to make the rig scalable.

For animation, I tackled the hardest shot first, the bench ejector one, and I’m glad I did, because it made the other shots seem much easier. I also got the help of a classmate for the compositing of this commercial, thanks Marco!

I shot this commercial with my trusty Canon 7D. If you have any other questions, just make a comment below – thanks for watching!

You can watch it below or go to Dorito’s website and watch it there, so then you can see my competition afterwards:

For comparison, here’s last years contest winner, who won one-million dollars:

You can vote by going to the contest’s YouTube page HERE. Then click the “Vote” tab, and look for my video in the “Vote for these Videos” window to the right of the current video that’s playing.

I created this short mainly between the hours of midnight and 3am for about a week and a half since I am a full time student at Vancouver Film School. I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity with the skills I’m learning here.

I always find it interesting to see how far I can push myself and see what quality I can produce in a short amount of time, especially when others are given the same task and I can compare what I’ve done with what is possible. Maybe it’s me living out some subconscious desire to be like MacGyver, but in a film contest: okay, you have 30 seconds to create something with the theme of escape, go.

I chose this story because I could get the animation done in the amount of time given. They are simple shapes, easy to model, rig and animate, relatively, but the relationships implied create a deeper story. So even though they’re simple, the story doesn’t have to be sacrificed.

There are three rounds to the competition, with only one winner that gets flown to Sydney for their short to be screened at a festival and also awarded $20,000. The top 10 winners for the first round will be announced July 25th.

I also just cranked out a short hang gliding video from a recent flight. I was going to hold onto the footage to use later, but decided it might get lost in the shuffle of school work so I just needed to cut it together and get it out. Hope you enjoy, that day was a great flight, although I’m a little rusty on the wingovers they’re always fun:

Run with wings WIP

The biggest news from me recently is I placed 3rd and won $3,800 in the Brisk Tea animation contest. I created this animation concurrent with my school assignments so I didn’t have a ton of time to put into it. I wanted to use it as a platform to take a project from start to finish. Thanks to Tongal and Brisk for putting on the contest and congrats to the other contestants!

Currently, I am restarting a run cycle/jump animation and just finished a short lip-sync below. I finally got around to learning how to composite in Nuke for the lip-sync. I really enjoyed the control over having all the passes in one flow down the node tree where in After Effects I’m trying to manage countless layers and precomps and how they’re interacting.

The audio for the lip-sync is from my favorite ‘break up’ movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” I have another lip-sync I did for this assignment using a “Dumb and Dumber” quote, but haven’t taken the time to polish the animation, texture, light, render, and composite it together.

(Click to see larger)

This one could still use some work, but just wanted to get it ‘shipped’ in the words of Seth Godin.

I also recently attended a screening of Thor with Digital Domain presenting their work on the ‘show.’ I found it interesting when they talked about the movie they called it a ‘show.’

What they did on the film is very cool and was more interesting to get first hand accounts of with working with Marvel and all the shots that did and did not make it and to see all the original footage. It was like a special features DVD on steroids. They basically made two movies because half of their shots made the film and half did not.

For comparison to using Nuke here's After Effects

Almost all the green screen shots with people in Frost Giant suits were not used, so Digital Domain replaced the actors in suits with 3D animated models. There was one guy, the presenter joked, who spent months building 14 different bridges (digitally) for the frost world and none of them were used in the movie.

It’s awe-inspiring to get a behind the scenes look at how much work goes into these films. It really makes you appreciate the film on another level and that’s what would make me a horrible film critic, because I respect the hard work that goes into making films too much to be able to tear them down.

Anyways, I’m separating my YouTube channels from here on out. I’m only going to be putting hang gliding videos on alta8bird and put my animation and other work on LucasRidley.

For this animation I went to a bar and took a photograph of the pool table and shot an HDRI by taking different exposures of a chrome ball, like this and used it to light my animation within Maya.

But, with some new knowledge acquired during my short time at Vancouver Film School so far, I wanted to try out a few things. The first contest I entered recently was for Dairy Queen. Unfortunately, I did not make the finals in that one, but I’m getting fairly accustomed to that at this point.

A quick update on school is that I am about halfway through the program and am storyboarding out my final animation piece that I will spend the next 6 months creating. My inspiration for my animation has been the work Meindbender studios has done, as well as the short ‘For the Birds,’ and the short film created from a children’s book “The Gruffalo” (among many others).

The vending machine and all the cups that come spilling out of it were all created in 3D:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MNGYZ3OTFY

The most recent contest I did was all 3D animation. So it was good practice to see a project from start to finish (while still trying to keep up with school work). I did everything, modeling, lighting, animating, compositing, sound, etc. The winners of this contest will be announced in one week:
http://tongal.com/work/1ghcuf?sc=wj0t

To vote for this video go HERE.

I called in a favor from a local actor, Mark Murray, to help me out and we took about an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon to film it. I already had everything storyboarded out so it wasn’t too complicated. The hard part came with the post production, which is always a struggle to make your ideas actually work. That is especially true because I was pressed for time to do the post production, because after we filmed on Sunday then I went to Colorado for a week and had just enough time to finish this before it was due Monday (I’ll blog about the CO trip soon).

Mark Murray was nice enough to put his face on a dirty sidewalk for the production of this video - Thanks Mark!

It was a great learning opportunity and gained a lot of experience with trying to motion track things and also just more experience with the Canon 7D and rolling shutter issues. Whether I place in this contest or not (grand prize is $10,000) I enjoyed the process, as I always do.

All the special effects were done using Adobe After Effects and used a combination of the built-in tracker and the Mocha tracker to track in the special effects. That was the hardest part of this whole project and I think I was mildly successful with the end result, but as I mentioned I did learn a lot. The live action effects are from Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 DVD and I really enjoy working with their products.

Action Essentials 2 at work on a downtown building

I did a little location scouting way before I even wrote the story board and landed on the location next to the Tivoli Theater in downtown Chattanooga. It was a nice backdrop with the Tivoli sign, and there was a large building across the street so I could blow that up (see above picture). But the key parts were to have a building with a window, so I could put in my own tv there for the news broadcast, and then also have an alleyway for the dog to come out of. Of course, I had to figure out a way to include my dogs in the film, so I thought it would add some chaotic atmosphere to have a dog running with leash dragging behind it.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to make and I really appreciate Mark’s help on it too!

The winners are selected by a split of 49% public vote and 51% judges votes. The two winners are flown to Cannes, France for a week to compete in a film competition. Other interesting characteristics of this contest were you had to be 18-28 to enter and you couldn’t use any music. That last one was tough since music can play such a crucial role in videos, especially ones with emotional subject matter. This one is for WaterAid.org who wants you to sign a petition trying to get world leaders to stick to what they signed 10 years ago, the Millenium Development Goals. At the current rate they’ll be about 200 years late achieving the sanitation standards they signed on for. So this petition is important, don’t let them drop this issue.

So my idea was to try and play to the fact we couldn’t have music, so I tied in sounds with the issue. It’s tough just to hear someone blabber on sometimes, so to have those sound fx under my voice helps break up the monotony I hope. I am happy with it considering I made it within 48 hours of reading the brief for the contest. Half the battle is coming up with an idea, or ideas, and then picking which one is the best, and then sitting there and thinking, ‘okay this is going to take a while’ and now I have to actually do it. But that personal challenge is also part of the fun. I’ll be interested to see how many people actually entered this contest because of the 48 hour restriction. My other idea was to actually film with my camera and not do animations, but that meant going to several locations (for the alternative idea), ask favors of the location people, and maybe try and ask a favor of a friend to help. Instead, I just sat in front of my computer and cranked this out.

I did everything in After Effects CS4 (I really want to get that CS5 upgrade) except for the ending logo animation with the water drop. That was done in Cinema 4D and I actually downloaded a trial version of RealFlow just to have an excuse to use it and see what it’s like (It costs $1,000!). That animation could have been a lot nicer, but I had to turn things off like Global Illumination and certain aspects of the materials like transparency in the water because it was taking forever to render. After almost 3 hours it had gotten through a ‘first pass’ on about 30 frames (out of 250). So I had to ratchet down the quality just to get it rendered.

The After Effects stuff was pretty straight forward, but tedious. The biggest thing was just trying to come up with some kind of style for it that would work throughout the video. I think it’s a little too grungy for my taste (that’s why I shattered it when it says “You make a difference”), but you can tweak and think and rethink yourself into oblivion with stuff like that, and that wasn’t going to work for the 48 hour deadline. I did enjoy using Red Giant Trapcode’s Particular 2 plug-in. That’s how I created the stick figure scene. I’m familiar with Particular (that’s how I made the cloud finger-tracer effect in my HP video) so it was fun to get my hands on it again, but I wish I had more time to play with it, I think I could have made that piece of the animation bit prettier (see the “4,000″ photo above).

One thing that snagged me for a while was it was taking forever to preview that short sequence and I couldn’t figure it out, then I realized I had selected “Random – Play Once” instead of “Random – Still Frame” for the layer I was using to populate that crowd of stick people. So every frame it was having to repopulate each 4,000 particle, when what I want it to do was produce 4,000 and then just stay there, which was the “Random – Still Frame” option. Enough of that technical stuff . . .

I forgot to mention I only started working on it Saturday afternoon because I wanted to fly in the morning. Then I stayed up all night except for a 2 hour nap and worked on it. I started to go a little crazy when I couldn’t nail the voice over stuff. I had to keep saying “like a toilet” over and over. I still don’t think it works in the video, but I had to stop trying to get it just right because I was going crazy repeating “like a toilet” over and over. You never realize how hard it is to copy your own voice and match voiceovers together, it’s something you never think about, but is the reason getting voiceovers in one or two takes quickly will have the same tone and pitch in your voice.

I want to thank Ashley and Isaiah for letting me have their time and patience to make this, as well as, Angela and Jen for helping with the voiceover work.

It was fun to make and I hope you enjoy!

Also, below is another interview I did for a website I use a lot called films4prizes.com. It’s a site that collects a lot of video contests going on at the moment so you don’t have to search for them. They do a pretty good job, but sometimes they’ll be a little late in posting a contest or might miss a few completely, but it is much easier to just go to their site than do all that grunt work yourself of finding these contests.

Also, a while back I posted extra interview footage from A Soaring Life of Andre Wolf and Dustin Martin (click their names to go to the interviews).

Right now I’m working on a 60 second short film, not hang gliding related, that has a few visual effects shots in it that I’m not sure if I can pull off yet or not. Stay tuned, because if I can make these effects work then I’ll be done with the video in about a week or so. I’m using a bunch of green poster board from walmart to make my green screen – it’s a pretty good option compared to what a real one costs, and gets the job done almost as well.

Also don’t forget about my 365 day photoblog over at my tumblr site, my tumblr posts also show up as tweets in the right side bar as ‘My Tweets.’

I entered in a contest at Tongal.com where you had to describe the loan process at Kiva.org. I’m proud to be apart of this contest because I really think Kiva.org is an incredible service.

Basically, you get to pick who you give a microfinance loan to, with the minimum you can give being $25. You don’t pick a group of people or an organization that will then give it out. You pick the exact person you want to loan to. If you want to loan to a woman in Africa that is trying to open a grocery store, you can do that. And it’s a loan, not a donation, you get repaid.

While there are risks the average repayment rate across all of Kiva is 98%. See here for the risks associated with lending and Kiva.

To see mine and other videos on the contest website go HERE.

There are two phases to this contest. 1) popularity: videos are ranked and given prizes according to how many times they are viewed (one view per IP address). 2) Judges pick several winners.

Both phases have cash prizes so please pass this blog post around so I can get more views. They announce the judges winners on the 22nd, but the viewing phase goes until Jan 31st.

I’m thinking of posting a tutorial on how I did the 2.5D image effect with the face fading in After Effects. If you’d be interested in seeing that tutorial, make a comment below and if there’s enough interested I’ll record a tutorial on face morphing and creating a 3D scene with photographs in After Effects.