The Animation Bites Festival: Wednesday 16th May - showcasing student animated films from Staffordshire University and a selection of professional films.

You should know what this is about as I've been talking about it more or less constantly in my journals, but if not you can check in some of the previous entries for info.

I'll update this each day until the festival

Wednesday 09 May
This was the final deadline for submissions to the festival, but due to a massive shortage of films submitted I've decided to extend it to Monday. Two days before the festival itself.
This should be interesting, considering I'm the one that has to transfer everyone's films and edit them all together... something that will probably take 2-3 days to do.
Luckily there have been more submissions coming in today so the count is bumped up a bit. The judged entries have been sent off to the judges and we have received the professional category films. I just need to rip them from the dvds and edit them together. I just need to find out what format the reel needs to be on for the screening before I burn the final copy.
The tickets have been sorted out thanks to *skanking-rob and the design looks awesome. Just need to get them printed up and we be rollin'.

I may have to cut back on getting the art trades done for a while. Looks like with all the Animation Bites stuff going on and other work we've gotta do, this week next week is gonna be busy as hell.

Bring it on

Thursday 10 May
A lot of progress was made today. 2nd year Rob Pimblott is working on a quick animation for when the names come up on screen, we discussed the need for posters to advertise the festival, another ident is being made by a few of the 2nd years, and I talked with Tony about ripping the dvds so I can put them in the reel.
Most importantly though, there have been a few new submissions and more are on the way. We still need as many as we can get, but the fact that people are starting to get their films to me pleases me
Now I've just gotta spend all of tomorrow transfering the films to my hard drive and start editting them all together.

Friday 11 May
Today was very much full of agro and stress for the most part. Editing always seems to be like that.
I started with the professional films as one of them was already in an uncompressed Quicktime file so should be the easiest to transfer. The other films were dvds so I'll have to figure that out later (doesn't help with the tutor not being present as he said to help me rip the video from them). Unfortunately, with the file being uncompressed it was very large and wouldn't transfer directly to my external hard drive.
For the record, I put everything on there as I'm working on campus to edit and need to be able to use it on any computer.
After 5 minutes of trying to stop the now locked-up transfer and eject the disk, I tried importing through iMovie. I hate that program. The film in question is 16:9 ratio, yet every time I tried importing it came in at 4:3 no matter how I changed the settings.
As I'd spent the entire morning doing this I eventually I gave up on trying and moved on to the student films.

Once again, there were problems with importing the files into Final Cut, so again, I had to use iMovie to re-export. After much waiting for them to render, finding the quality has dropped or the file is suddenly 10 times larger than before, and exporting again, I managed to get the majority imported correctly.
Editing from there was relatively painless, although I've found that the ident we have has corrupted slightly and I may have to render that out again. Joy.

Then came the Mini DV tapes. In retrospect, this is the format I possibly should have asked for, although there's a chance that the video would corrupt/get damaged, or the image quality would drop. Technical reasons, basically.
Anyway way, capturing the video from these was a major pain. First of all the capture wouldn't even begin, and I had to shut everything down that I was doing and start a new file. Once I'd got that to work with the help of our technician I had to trasfer everything back to my hard drive. After this point things finally started to ease up and the Macs behaved.
Weird, it only ever happens near the end of the day...

So, by now pretty much all of the entries I've got so far have been put into the festival reel. I just need to sort out a few more and put all the names in place. Also need to re-edit the Judged category films.

In spite of all the agro I had today, the day actually ended on a fairly high note with everything more or less done. Watching ~philippajudith's films was really nice and quite soothing too
Now I need to get everything finalised on Monday so as to move onto other things festival related and so I can get back to my own work full-time.

Saturday 12 May
Me and *skanking-rob went into the town centre to get some thing for the film festival. First stop was a place the get plaques engraved for the trophies. Those would take a few hours so we gave them the info and a deposite and carried on.
Next stop was to get some felt for the bottom of the trophies made by Rob.
Then we headed to HMV to get some gift vouchers to give to the winners. Must have spent about £80 there.
Then to Woolworths for some frames for the award certificates, followed by a trip to Webberley's for the paper and metallic sprays for the trophies.
That's pretty much everything we needed so we went to Subway to get some lunch, had a quick look inside Forbidden Planet, picked up the finished plaques, bought some clothes and called it a day

Sunday 13 May
Nothing new to report for today.

Monday 14 May
More editing. First came trying to get the professional films which went okat although one of the dvds decided not to work. Dunno why, as it works just fine in a player, but not on the Mac. Hopefully I can find out a way of getting that one because it's very good and it would be a shame to not be able to show it.
I finished editing the rest of the show, and added the ident and name clips created by our 2nd year, Rob.
Now I'm currently trying to add the pro films, which is unfortunately proving to be a pain. The files captured from the dvds are huge and keep causing Final Cut to lock up when I try to import them. This isn't helping the process at all, as you can imagine. I can't even force quit the program, as even if it disappears it still registers as being on so I can't reopen it and start a new file
I'll see if I can sort this out before the day is done since I want to have this ALL rendered and burned to dvd before the end of Tuesday. Preferably much sooner.

EDIT: Right, it took a lot of workarounds, but I finally got the films edited. Tried using iMovie to put them onto Mini DV, so I could capture them back into Final Cut. The recording went fine, but the capturing did not. Kept freezing and dropping frames. I went back to the idea I was hoping not to have to do and compressed each file individually, which took around an hour or so. I finally managed to get then files down to a reasonable size so I could work with them.
Wow. Seems like over the last week I've found out most of the limits of the systems we have here, and had just about anything that could go wrong, actually go wrong.
BUT! I have FINALLY managed to get that all sorted! Now all that remains are a few minor edits to tidy things up, and then exporting the videos to burn on dvd. Then this will finally be ready

Also, the tickets have been printed up and the programme is more or less done, thanks to ~rickiscool80.

Now I wonder what trials tomorrow will bring that I'll have to overcome?

Tuesday 15 May
Heh, I actually lost track of what day it was today. For a moment I thought it was Monday. Wishful thinking?

So today involved finishing off the editing and converting all the files to Quicktime format. This involved hours upon hours of waiting. After pretty much the entire day had gone by I'd almost got everything rendered and ready for burning... apart from the main file with all the festival entries. First half works fine, but the second half is corrupted and keeps skipping. Go figure that half is 3rd year work. Contains *skanking-rob's, ~rickiscool80's, ~philippajudith's, and mine to name a few. I had to split the file there and re-render it. I dunno if it worked as I didn't really have time to check, so I'll have to do that tomorrow morning and render the other half.

I had really hoped to have the dvds done by the end of today but it looks like I'm gonna be cutting it close to the screening itself at this rate. It's gonna be a long day but there is light at the end of the tunnel in knowing that it's almost ready and I have another option in case this doesn't work. Hopefully it does and I can just get on with it so we have something to show.

Oh, by the way, my apologies if I've been neglecting comments or otherwise seeming absent lately. All of this is taking up my time and energy so I'm not on dA as much. I just check in to see what's new.

Wednesday 16 May
It's here! The screening is gonna start in less than an hour but I've gotta head out to test everything in a few minutes so I'm updating now.
For a change, most things actually went right today! It all seems to have come together at the last minute and I've got all the dvds burning and a backup copy on MiniDV.
I'll update tomorrow with how everything went. For now I'm gonna go get this thing sorted so I can project it.
Wish me luck!