Looking for add'l team members for A3F 2006 Film Festival!

[JasonGW]

Earlier this year the Ugly Baby Studios team (myself and 3 other geeky folks) entered the first annual A3F--Almost Famous Film Festival, in Phoenix, Az. The A3F works like this: You show up at the launch party on Friday night, where you're given a set of guidelines. This year they involved a theme for the story, a line of dialog that had to be in the film, and a prop that had to be in the film. The '06 fest will follow a similar format.

For 2005 we created a short animated film in 48 hours using Illustrator/Flash/Photoshop. All in all we did really well, and got an Honorable Mention. Not as good as we hoped for, but better planning could have helped, as we went in dry and built 100% of the artwork from scratch.

Anyway, the 2006 A3F is coming up during the weekend of February 17th-19th, and the plan this year is to do an animated short, but all in 3D. In order to pull it off, the plan is to build a stock library of objects, all fully textured, and a stock library of common animations. We'll obviously have to do *some* custom animations, given that we can't predict what the theme or dialog will be, and we'll probably have to build one custom model and texture, since we can't predict what the prop will be, but aside from that we think we can build a library of common materials so that instead of creating artwork, we'll just be assembling it into scenes.

In order to avoid the problem of rendering time, the short film will be built entirely within the Unreal Engine Runtime and then exported to a Quicktime or AVI format for editing in premiere.

To pull this off properly, we need to begin planning and building assets right now, and we need to test methodologies by building from 1-3 animated shorts using this method between now and the time of the festival. I've currently got 4 people onboard, but we'd like to add some new team members to help spread out the workload. We're all based in Southern California, but those based in or near Phoenix Arizona are more than welcome as well. Indeed, anyone who'd like to contribute models or animations would be welcome to join the team; come the weekend of the festival I expect that 5-7 of us will go to Phoenix to do the actual construction of the animated short, since too many more than that may just clog the workflow (though that could change if we see that we can get a group that can work really well with each other). If we place well (the awards Ceremony will happen in March 2006, with a theatrical viewing of all movies submitted) and we're agreed that we're happy with the work, we can then submit our movie to other festivals across the country.

In addition to this, if you're interested in writing--news, reviews, editorials, tutorials, etc., our website is an E3 approved media outlet and our members go to E3. We did our first E3 back in May (obviously) and it was absolutely awesome. We expect to cover E3 2006 thoroughly as well, and we're actively looking for people to join our ranks for this and other projects.

If you're interested, please drop me a line and let's get the ball rolling! You can visit our site and register to post in the forums (we don't do spam, fear not : ).

I hope to hear from you soon!

Jason Ward

Ugly Baby Studios

[JasonGW]

Just FYI, we just finished the competition during the above specified weekend, and found out yesterday that we're officially in the top 20! W00t! Thursday we'll find out exactly how we did, but at the least we know for sure that we whipped 44 other teams who entered

Jason