Hello everyone,

For those that don't know me, I am John Hankins, also known as castlegardener. Marc and I are going to set this forum up so we can begin animation exercises in an atttempt to help out everyone's skillsets and just to share little tests with each other. We are working on the formats and rules but are getting close. Stay tuned.

Castlegardener

It is my impression that all the animation exercises will lumped together under this one umbrella. We will start with one animation exercise a month. Any suggestions or ideas can be emailed to me if you don't want them heard here. The exercises will be simple little tests designed to help you improve your animation skills and a fun way just to have something to share with others.

Sounds good castle, in January i'll be able to start contributing, and i can't wait till be able to. Great to see you as a member of the staff.

Thanks Bob, I am just here to do what I can to help other animators.

This should be fun as always. Now with more time between exercises maybe more people will do them.

I'm going to link to these exercises on the home page that shows up after you login to the site. It should help raise some awareness.

(^ just for fun, I've another far more complex excersize in mind.

 (^a rather long winded one:  i'll try to tell marc spess about it.

(^ as of yet, the only person I've given 86% of the concept to is  someone i call snapdragon.

(^ he's pretty busy at the moment, but this is almost a complete revers skew of his skills.

(^ so Spess. catch up with me sometime when you're awake and  tell me how to skype or verb chat heck even flat out IM would work.

(^ I'll try to do the next part of puppetXchange using a lever to open a box that has a Seamus J. clown/jester within:

(^ but that's a wHole other ballyhoowee.

Do the winners win anything, or is this just to show off our work.

Ok, I get the idea!

Challenge Idea: Why don’t we do something like the old Harryhausen movies? We could construct dinosaurs and have them fight or destroy buildings. Also, I think it would be fun to film ourselves for parts of the films. The live action could be combined with a greenscreened animation and we could battle and be eaten by the creatures. Submissions would need to be black and white. I'm definitely not a stop motion expert, but I think this would be fun. What do you guys think?