Assembly Animation Compo Review

Written by v0id

This is a review of the Animation compo at Assembly '99. I have examined the top 5 anims and this is what I think about them. All of them are rendered, stored in MPEG format and are about 19 to 33 MB. But let's start with place number five.

Itsenäisyyspäivä By Muumiperhe - 5th Place - 764 points - 2:04 min

This is about a mumin troll, when mumin father is on his way home an alien ship comes and destroys the mumins' house. Mumin father gets really angry so he takes his super laser weapon and then the alien ship crashes. I can't say much about this animation. It is like a cartoon story except for the explosions and stuff. Technically this animation isn't that good. The keyframing could have been better. Another bad thing is that the speech is in Finnish without any English subtitles.

Kvackzilla By Fragment - 4th Place - 1225 points - 3:04 min

A little duck gets on vacation at last, enters a military test zone and is nucked. The duck grows big, and now the story is almost the same as Godzilla. At the first glance the graphics are ok, but after a minute or two, the objects are just getting worse and worse modeled. But as you can read in the info file, "the last minute was made in quite a hurry... only a few days before Assembly '99", so that explains why the objects aren't so well modeled. One other thing is that all speech is in Finnish but there are English subtitles. And the concept is kinda cool.

Drugwars By Vortex - 3rd Place - 1272 points - 3:03 min

This animation is about a war between two different drugs. First we see a speech by some drug leader, then we get right into the war. We follow this little painkiller, he kills some enemies, then a big grenade explodes. When he wakes up after this grenade attack, we get to see the painkiller in some Quake or Delta Force, inspired camera angle. But then he gets shot by an enemy sniper. This is a very funny movie, the graphics are nice but not realistic anyway, but I guess that's not the point either. It's well keyframed with that delta force camera angle. One bad thing is that there are not any subtitles in English; they are in Finnish.

Paradise By 720 and Bluecow - 2nd Place - 1962 points - 3:12 min

This animation is about a toy penguin that gets tired of going around this ramp all day long. The penguin imagines that the outer world would be like a paradise, so he jumps out of this toy ramp. The problem is that as this penguin is "just" a toy penguin it can't walk 'cause it has those rollers, so this penguin is stuck between the ramp and the "paradise". When I saw this animation for first time I had problems to see if it was rendered or if it was made with a camera. The modelling and keyframing are of top quality. Without any exception, all models, not just the penguins and the ramp but the whole scene, are very well modelled, and thanks to that you get a better atmosphere, which raises the quality even more. I think that 720 and Bluecow easily could sell this animation to Cartoon Network or some other Cartoon TV channel. This animation is both funny, sad, technically advanced, and nicely keyframed & modeled. A real killer, that is. BTW check out the fresh interviews with the makers in this Hugi issue.

Grumps By Jarno - 1st Place - 2252 points - 1:55 min

This one is about two old men. One of them gets a paper in its face and starts screaming, and the other tells him to shut up. After a while both of them are screaming at each other, and one of them slaps the other. For an instance he thinks he has killed the other man. But he was just joking. Now they really start fighting. One of the men grabs a shotgun and fires. But the bullets just go right through his opponent (like in Terminator 2). After some weird stuff, they start using laser swords (like in Star Wars). Technically this is the most advanced animation of the top 5 with mouth movements and very "realistic" modelling. The keyframing is very good. So this is an animation you must see if you like 3d rendered animations. The only thing I think is bad is that the animation is very short.

This review has come to an end. One thing I consider very bad about these animations is that many of them are in Finnish but I guess we have to live with that because it's a Finnish party. Especially the top 2 animations were of an excellent quality, and I hope we will see more of that in the future. All animations are available at http://www.scene.org.

v0id / Alpha Millennium