Voovees.com presents: Twilight 48Hour Parody Competition #1

I hearby announce the first ever Voovees.com Twilight 48Hour Parody Competition begins!

Over the next 48 hours, all the parodies that you, the registered user, make of the Twilight Parody vol.1 and vol.2, will be eligible for prizes!

The single parody, out of all the parodies made from both scenes, with the highest view count, will get to choose from a range of prizes. Also, the entry with the highest overall rating, will also get to choose from a range of prizes. Even if you just register to enter by making one remix, you still might get the chance to win the limited 5 lucky draw prizes. For the details about the prizes and rules, see competition rules.

The clock is ticking away even as you read this, so get to it! Start making twilight parodies!

Also, please help us spread this contest, you can get blog / tweet / shout at the top of your roof, get as many of your friends to enter! It’s something fun to do anyway. You can get the banner from this link, and link to the competition rules page where the big count down clock is, post them everywhere!

We won Best Animation for “Bite Sized Love” (see it in our earlier post) for the 48Hours Furious Filmmaking Challenge (I suspect it’s the regional award), so if you’re in New Zealand you might be able to see it on TV next Thursday evening (8.30pm, June 27th, C4), if it gets the national Best Animation award. Fingers crossed.

Well, at least my interview with them might come up, but don’t expect too much, sleep deprivation may have an impact on my ability to speak properly in front of the camera.

On the other front, BitFilm voting is able to end in a few days, so this is the last chance to vote for our nominated Parking Warden entry, so Let’s get Voting!!

Even though 48Hours’ results have been announced, I got an email yesterday from Steve the Christchurch’s 48 manager, that our team have won the best animation category in Christchurch, and so we are still in contention for the nation-wide animation award. It’s great news, though I don’t know, I have a sneaking suspicion that this is largely due to the fact that our team is the only animation team in Christchurch. Anyway, still feel quite lucky.

On other fronts, the development of ZenCub3d still goes on, even though losing some traction due to the random happens in entrepreneurs’ lives in the last month or so. We have identified the cause of a few mysterious bugs that have eluded us for a while, so the debugging team is dispatched, fully equipped and on their way. The next release mainly focuses on bug fixing, so not much changes in terms of features is expected. Oh yeah, curved waypoints have been in our development branch for a while, so if it reaches a stable enough status you guys might see it in the next release. We’ll certainly post some videos on it when it’s ready.

Lastly, votely on BitFilm is slowly coming to an end. I got an email from them inviting me to attending the award ceremony in Hamburg, and as much as I ‘LOVE’ taking 40+ hour flights to Europe, I had to turn it down since alot of ThinkingCactus internal stuff is happening this half of the year. But nevertheless, have a look at our nominated entry and consider voting for us if you think we deserve it

Not being in the regional finals means we can show our short right now, so without further adu, here’s ‘Bite Sized Love’

Note: this is a slightly edited version to the one that we shown at the public screening previously, we’ve added a little extra easter-egg after the ending credits.

I must say though, the film look alot darker watching this on YouTube than on my computer, hmmm… For 48’s submission we had to submit a film in PAL which is 720×576 @ 25 fps, which if I remember correctly YouTube doesn’t like too much…

Launch night, the Christchurch manager, Steve Austin, making an announcement.

Every film must include 3 random elements, a character, a prop and a line a dialog, which were provided on the launch night between 6pm and 7pm. Each team are also randomly provided with a genre which the team’s script should stick to. The final judging will look at how well and innovative the team used these random elements and genre. This year’s possible genres can be found here.

So we have:

• Character: “Kerry Post”, a perfectionist
• Prop: a Brush
• Line of dialog: “Wait a minute”
• Our Genre: Buddy Movie

Over the 48 hours, I think I had about 4 hour sleep, which is probably a bit more than what I first expected to have, haha. in retrospect, we still could have organised our time better, but I wasn’t not too picky about that, as long as everyone were having fun, it was good.

It the end we came up with a film named “Bite Sized Love”, a short story about two guys, Dave and Kerry. Can’t say much more about that, 48Hours have strict rules and we don’t want to say anything about our film until after the first public screening takes place on Wednesday. What I’ll say is though, this is the longest animation that we’ve made, in the shortest amount of time, and we’re all quite happy about that.

We like to thank all our sponsors, by having Greg finish all the food that they kindly given us for the weekend. There are actually more food in the fridge and the 3kg bag of coffee beans from Underground Coffee isn’t featured in this picture.

Final group photo with most of the group holding up notes and story boards, and me holding the submission envelope with the tape to submit inside. Bryan, Paul and Rhem missing from this photo.

The photo shoot soon turned violent.

After the violence receded, we made our way to the YellowCross where the final finish line is. We had about 48 minutes to spare in the 48 hours.

Getting an interview from C4TV after I got the submission in.

I just want to thanks all the guys and girls that helped us over this weekend, (not in any particular order) Matt, Steve G, Bryan, Chris, Amanda, Izzy, Morris, Greg, Paul and Rhem, it was really fun working with you guys, maybe we can do it again next year.

After the Wednesday screening, I’ll make public the video that we made, and get a link to YouTube from this blog. I’ll even throw in a few extra stuff that’s not in our submission.

Now, just need to get some sleep after that.

Having seen the event many time during my university years, I’ve always wanted to get involved somehow… Just seems like the totally random event that I would be interested in.

Well, the chance is here, and we are entering this year’s 48Hours, which is the biggest film making contest in New Zealand. Teams from around the country will be dipping their brain cells in caffeine (well, in this case likely “V”, since they are sponsoring the event), trying to make a film incorporating the random genre and elements that we get given on the launch night (TONIGHT), within 48 hours. Going to be a rather crazy weekend. Apparently there are over 600 teams entering this year.

We are entering as an animation team, and will be filming with the software that we developed ourselves (well, if you’re here you probably know about our software already). We’ve been quite happily making animations in record breaking times so far, and this will be a good stress test to see how far we can push the whole animation process.

Knowing how strict the organisers are with the 48 hour time limit (1 second late, is too late), I’m still relatively confident about getting an animation out within the 48 hours. Hopefully we’ll still get the time to throw in some extra stuff at the end if time allows.

We’ll be spending pretty much the next 2 days in our office building, walled away in a networked room with a bunch of guys cranking on this thing, although not exactly a romantic thing, it should be very much fun at least.

We’ve got a bunch of sponsors that we want to thank, they are:

• Hell Pizza
• Funky Pumpkin
• Verkerks
• Underground Coffee
• Last but not least, the Canterbury Innovation Incubator (Cii), they are pretty much family to us.

If I get the chance I might write a few quick blogs about our progress over the weekend.