2012 Skills Canada National Competition

This year I was lucky enough to be a judge at the 2012 Skills Canada National Competition for 2D Animation. It was a fantastic opportunity to be part of this great event.

The animations that I was judging were high school level. It was extremely impressive to see such a high amount of enthusiasm and passion in the students. The fact that they have the opportunity to experience such a specific field at their age is fantastic.

Something I really enjoyed about watching the work was to see the different approaches the students took to achieve the same goal. Each two person team was given a theme to portray through their animations which were judged based on story, creativity, animation, audio, storyboards, and character turnarounds. Quite a lot of work to complete and present in two days.

There were many different style choices that the students used as well. Their preferences and personalities definitely shone through in their work. There were animations that were in very cut-out styles, there were traditional frame-by-frame styles, and there were some with a combination of the two. The other thing I was impressed with was some of their palette choices, background illustrations, and character designs. It was easy to tell which of the groups had a fine arts background (hooray for them!).

I had a couple of challenging tasks being a judge. The first was sitting in front of all the students and parents while being presented to, and giving feedback to them with a microphone for the crowd to hear. I felt sort of like a TV show host. It was really great, but challenging for the fact that it was difficult to come up with a unique response for every animation.

The other challenging thing was after the presentations were finished, the judges had to sit down and go through all of the animations again to have specific critiques. It was great to get a second look at all of the work and I was again really impressed by some, but it was hard to judge their work based on their experience. It wasn’t difficult to tell that some groups had more exposure than others the field of animation, both artistically and technologically. Working with my fellow judges made the task so much easier.

I really enjoyed this event, and was honoured to be chosen to be a judge. There are some great young artists out there just bursting with energy to get into the field of animation. It’s so exciting!

Here are links to two of the animations by the participants:

-Meaghen