Lessons in Resilience

The top prize for N.E.Mation! II went to Jurong JC’s entry, Nation Moulders.

Seen the video clips submitted to this year’s N.E.Mation! II competition yet? They were broadcast on TV during the public voting season earlier this year and are also viewable on the N.E.Mation! website.

Each video might only be one minute long or so, but that belies the months of preparation, training and hard work that went into creating it. The top three prize-winners – respectively, Jurong JC, Hwa Chong Institution and Raffles Institution – give us a glimpse into their nine-month long adventure in animation.

The early stages

N.E.Mation! II kicked off in June last year, with school teams submitting their story ideas on the theme of “Resilience”. Forty out of the 106 teams who entered the competition were then chosen for a one-week training cum selection programme, held at the School of Interactive & Digital Media in Nanyang Polytechnic in September 2007.

At the end of this one week, 10 finalists emerged. These 10 teams spent a further three weeks during their December holidays in the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University for training and production of their final animation clip.

Hwa Chong Institution students came up with Heartbeat of a Nation, which took the second prize.

Overcoming challenges

For winning team JJ AVAC from Jurong JC, their initial idea was to use not clay but metal wires as a medium. Their trainers from Animagine, a local graphics production house and one of the organisers of the competition, suggested clay as it is a more malleable material compared to wires. It would also better fit what they were trying to achieve with their proposed story.

However, the team soon realised that using clay wasn’t that easy. “It was difficult for us to mould the clay figurines as the clay we used was quite hard and to shape it into various models was a challenge,” shares team leader Ong Zheng Bao.

“The number of clay models that we had to prepare was overwhelming. We also had to keep up with the standards of the trainers and ensure our models weren’t sub-standard. Just to get things right, we would stay till midnight on several occasions just to complete our task, when other groups had long gone home,” shares another team member, Sunny Chua.

On one occasion, the bulb for the spotlight they were using for production blew its fuse twice in the same day. The spotlight was critical: without it, the team could not proceed with production. Fortunately, their trainers went out twice to get new bulbs for them.

“Our production schedule was one of the tightest amongst all the teams and we were already lagging behind,” recalls Sunny. “When the bulb was finally fixed, we rushed to complete the work and stayed till 1 a.m. It was the latest we had ever stayed. But on hindsight, it was definitely worth it!”

Raffles Institution’s entry, Blackout won the third prize.

Adapting to real-time demands

Time constraints were also common issues for team RandomInk from Hwa Chong Institution, the first runner-up in the competition. Titled “Heartbeat of a Nation”, their animation clip showed ordinary Singaporeans helping one another in crisis situations. “Our main challenge was to keep to the original schedule we had set for ourselves. Fortunately, we included a buffer period just in case things went wrong,” says team member, Matthew Lim.

RI’s R-Force team produced a cartoon strip that showed how Singaporeans might react during a nationwide blackout, based on an actual blackout that had occurred in 2004. While the storyline was a refreshing one, the team agreed that storyboarding was a big challenge. “We had to constantly review and rewrite to create a story with enough impact,” says team leader Clement Kweh.

But perhaps the biggest challenge they encountered was a software problem. “The incompatibility of the animation software with the new Windows Vista operating system led the software to crash every few hours. The program would just shut down without warning and all our hours of work were lost in a second!” remembers team member Eddy Goh. “To safeguard against this, we saved three copies of each file so that if one of them was corrupted, a backup was available. It certainly tested our tenacity!” he quips.

Needless to say, the nine-month long project required a firm commitment from all the teams. But in spite of all the sweat, setbacks and sacrifice, all three winning teams agreed that seeing the fruit of their labour was one of the sweetest moments of the competition.