GENERATE CHALLENGE

     All day Friday and into Saturday Morning, SCAD Atlanta hosted the GENERATE 24 hour challenge.  This is a sort of contest where they take each department (animation, sequential art, etc.) and split them into small groups of 3-5 people.  Each department has a company come in and host a challenge that has to be completed within 24 hours.  Each group is usually assigned a unique topic.  My group was the Patchwork Pirates (so named because of our hodgepodge of members), part of the animation department.  This year, Turner hosted our challenge, and the challenge was to create a series pitch within 24 hours.  The pitch had to consist of:

A 15-30 second animatic of the opening

A Treatment

A 15 second Elevator Pitch

3-5 Character design style sheets

A full color style frame

3 Merchandise ideas in 3D

And an outline for an entire season

     All this had to be completed within 24 hours of the start, which meant 10am Friday to 10am Saturday.  Each group within the department was assigned a different network to pitch the idea to, which meant we had to research demographics, etc.  We were the group everyone wish they could have been, because we had Adult Swim as our focus.

     We did have some trouble though.  First, our original idea was poopooed by one of the professors who was leading the event.  The problem was the story idea had (unknowingly to the rest of our group) been used before by one of our members for various projects/classes.  So we had to rework the idea, change some of the character designs, and make things more edgy.  When we had finished that, we pitched the idea to the head of Adult Swim (or was it Turner Animation?) who loved it!  The second problem was that the member with the most experience in 3D and animation left for a previous engagement.  Unfortunately, another member also had to leave due to medical reasons.  That left 3 of us to do a huge task, and none of us were very experienced.

     Somehow we managed to pull though.  With the help from a friend, we managed to complete everything with an hour to spare.  Personally, I still think the look was too "cutesy", but since I was dedicated to doing the animatic by myself, I couldn't keep rejecting images so I just worked with what I got and tried to make it work.  Adult Swim usually does cheap, simple, exaggerated, and over-the-top animations, which are edgy and stylized.  I think we should have really pushed this more, but we would have needed more members involved through the entire project to assure the look we wanted.  However, I think we still managed to pull out a very good project with the limitations and complications that arose.  Since we did all that work, I won't go into presenting all of it again from scratch.  However, I will post the final PDF of the project as well as the animatic here, so you can see what we did.  Enjoy!

The Patchwork Pirates are:

Karen Chesney

David Hixon

Alston Jones

Colin Wheeler

Whitney Wheeler (no relation)

Special Thanks to Jenna Zona

View the PDF here!