Something cool happened to us last night!

A few week ago we participated in a New Zealand film making competition called the 48Hours, where teams come together around the country on one weekend (18th-20th May) and, basically make a short film in 48 hours!! Every year to make sure teams don't cheat and pre-make a film, each team picks a genre out of a hat and every film must contain certain random elements. This year those random elements were a character called Jerry Reed who had to be a hypochondriac, a line of dialogue "What do you call that?", and a prop, this year it was a rope.
We had never been involved with the comp before but had always thought it'd be a kick to see if we could make an animated film in the time allowed! So this year we decided to give it a try. We went on the Friday night to get our genre and were nervous as all hell, I guess it was just the not knowing, as there were a few genres we really didn't want to get, or would've been really hard for us (Grind House and Unnecessary Sequel) but we pulled out Horror and were happy as larry!
So we set about making the film and everything came together really smoothly and, unusually, we had no computers crashing... yaayyy!! And most importantly we had heaps of fun and very little sleep!
So then 2 weeks after we handed the film in it came time to watch our film in a real life movie theatre for our heat. It was at The Civic, which is the actual theatre that appears at the end of Peter Jacksons King Kong, the one Kong destroys!! It was a really cool atmosphere but watching a film you've made with a big audience is death inducing, we were sooo god damn nervous!! We got a really positive response though and actually won "Audience Fave" for our heat so were really stoked!! We then found out we made it into the Auckland Finals so were super stoked!!!
Which brings us up to last night, the Auckland Finals back at The Civic Theatre! We were up against 11 other films, some of which were freakin rad!! It was nail biting stuff, the place was packed and we actually felt like pooing AND spewing at the same time and that was even before the films started! Once again we got a really cool response with heaps of people cheering but it wasn't until the awards were getting handed out that things got crazy!! It came right up to the "Runner Up" award and hadn't won anything so figured we were out of it, and kinda relieved that we wouldn't have to get up in front of 2000 people! Then comes the last award "Best Film" and we get our name called.... F#*KIN HELL!!! Everything else was a blur, not even sure what we said when we went up to get the award, which is a really cool trophy called an "Apee", sculpted by a dude who worked at the Weta Workshop, we also won some money and a few other bits and bobs... man what an essay but it was such a cool night we just had to post about it, so here's some pics... (from left to right, Jeremy, Tim, Alex and Ryan)



Here are some rough development sketches from when I (Alex) was designing the characters! Right from the start we knew with whatever genre we got we'd just use 2 main characters. We decided to make them monstery because a) We knew almost everyone else would be using humans and we thought it'd be a cool way to stand out, and b) They're cool to draw!
I also wanted to make them up of just basic shapes, like a square guy and a rectangle guy, so it would be relatively easy to animate them. We ended up settling on the square and circle guys which we aptly named "Sid and Jerry".




But it doesn't stop there, we now go onto the National Finals where we go up against the other final winners from the other cities around New Zealand, and it's televised LIVE on TV on July 1st! As if watching it in the theatre wasn't scary enough!!!

So to sum up... yay for us!! And we want to say a huge massive giant THANK YOU to Ant Timpson and everyone else behind the event and all the Judges and everyone who liked our film... you're all rad!!! We just treated this like anything else we do and just made something that cracked us up, we never really know if other people will find it funny, so I guess we're just lucky they do!!

We can't post the film online just yet since we're in the finals but as soon as we can it'll be up on our blog quick smart so be sure to check back!!