Missed the previous season of N.E.mation? Here’s your chance to be part of N.E.mation 5! Registration is now open, and like before, a trip to DreamWorks Animation in the USA is up for grab! More details over at http://nemation.sg. Go form your team of 3 or 4 now!

From my personal experience, I know sometimes participants may have thoughts of dislike for the judges going through his/her mind if he/she lost. That’s also why, I hate being a judge for any competition. Especially one like this, where I’ve seen and experienced the production process together with the teams.

Well, I’ve received feedback from the judges for N.E.mation! 4, and I’ve to say, they’re all very impressed with the achievements and accomplishments by all of the ten teams! Sparing them from being identified in public *coughs*, I shall not reveal their face on the blog! Scroll down to read what they’ve got to say about your clip…

Building the Future with Our Hands – The Big Bang

“Interesting concept. Creative use of symbolism to depict what our hands can do.” – Iqbal Sanjiman, Senior Manager at OnePeople.sg

“Nice, clear graphic sensibility” – Jazno Francoeur, Professor in Animation at DigiPen Institute of Technology

Post-it With Love - Yellow-Earthworms

“Clever, concise and charming” – Jazno Francoeur

“The ‘Post-it’ concept connects with the viewers.” – Felix Soh, Digital Media Editor at Singapore Press Holdings

Our Favourite Hotspot - N.E.mators!

“Catchy rap. Effective use of Singaporeans’ passion with food to engage and convey the message. One of my favourites.” – Ann Chan, Deputy Director, National Marketing and Resilience Division at MICA

“Fun and engaging. This definitely connect with a large group of audience.” – Felix Soh

Carevolution – Spoof

“It simply tugs at your heart strings. Inspires you to do more for Singapore” – Iqbal Sanjiman

“Very impressive work.” – Jacques Frety, Lecturer, School of Interactive and Digital Media at Nanyang Polytechnic

What’s Yours? - NJC Design Club

“I like the humourous touches. Make the clip memorable. The message comes through clearly and connects emotionally.” – Felix Soh

“Interesting and thought-provoking, ending off with a question that made me think why I care.” – Ann Chan

The Way Home - RandomAcademy

“The video establishes the fact that sometimes one needs to go away to strengthen our sentiments about home.” – Iqbal Sanjiman

“Sophicated execution of a clear and single message. This clip moved me emotionally.” – Felix Soh

pRICEless - C.H.E.F

“Very engaging video! Catchy and it simply shows our commonality – Rice.” – Iqbal Sanjiman

“Nice use of our staple food, rice, to thread the elements in the story.” – Ann Chan

Inking Our Vision - 822

“Simply shows that Singaporeans can ‘ink’ our future together. A creative video indeed!” – Iqbal Sanjiman

“Refreshingly creative concept. The execution is very sophisticated. I love the animation!” – Felix Soh

“Very original art direction.” – Jazno

Caretalysts – Catalysts

“The execution and craftmanship, plus script stands out.” – Felix Soh

“Clever styling.” – Jazno

Cir-care-latory System – DreamTeam

“Interesting idea but execution could be more polished.” – Jazno

“Engaging animation, with cute characters that would attract the young.” - Felix Soh

Overall

COL Lim Kok Siong, Director of Nexus, Ministry of Defence shared…

“Excellent range of perspectives on “Why I Care About Singapore”. The animations and storylines are original and show a lot of spontaneity.”

And Melvin Tan, Animator at Bluesky Animation Studio said…

“Overall I enjoyed all the pieces and thought they were very well done, considering they are only students and not working professionals. Really impressed at the quality and creativity that was churned out with this competition. Please convey my thoughts to all the students and also the people involved in this whole event. I can’t imagine the amount of hours put into these projects.”

Yes Melvin! Those who didn’t experience the arduous and tiring production these students have gone through will never be able to imagine how much effort and time has been put into these projects! Really! I salute all ten teams and the trainers from Animagine! Keep up the great work people!

Finally when the results were announced, I couldn’t help but cheer and clap as loud and long as I could for every finalist and winner. They’ve all done a great job and deserve our applause.

Congrats to all winners for N.E.mation! 4!

Champion for N.E.mation! 4 – National Junior College

1st Runner-Up – School of the Arts

2nd Runner-up – Dunman High School

Additional prizes were given out that day too! These were given out after the formal awards presentation, and were meant to reward the teams for their outstanding achievement in two categories:

(a) Best Booth Design: Each team had to come up with a creative design and concept for their booth to showcase to all the visitors who were present that day on 11 February 2010! Which were the 3 teams who came up with the best design?

(b) Best Social Media Team: This is the first time N.E.mation! teams each has their own Facebook Fanpage, and this prize is an encouragement to the team that did the best in engaging their fans through interesting updates, status posts and video posts!

BG Gary Ang, Deputy Secretary (Policy) of the Ministry of Defence gave out these prizes. And here are our winners….

Best Booth Design Winners –

Victoria School

School of the Arts

Methodist Girls’ School

Best Social Media Team – Anglican High School

N.E.mation! 4 was a great great experience for me and for everyone involved, especially the participants! Quoting from Carmen from Spoof…

… it’s not just about the awards or the prizes,

it’s about the process and the enjoyment…

Yes, the enjoyment of the entire process is most valuable, that’s one thing that money can’t buy.

The journey may have ended, but the experience is pRICEless and I believe many of us will all continue to be in touch (through facebook). We will be building the future with our hands and posting it everywhere, like our favorite hotspots or on our way home. At N.E.mation! 4, words were invented, like carevolution, caretalysts and cir-care-latory system. These are all inked into a part of our life story, one we will not forget. I will continue to share care for the people and things around me. That’s my “I Will” pledge. What’s yours?

[Sidenote: Alright, I've to admit that last paragraph was a little off, but I tried my best. If you'd noticed, there are the ten titles of our ten finalists' clips. Have a great year of the Tiger ahead everyone!]

What Will You Do?

This year, in line with Total Defence Day, the “I Will” campaign was started. Back in primary school, I recall learning about National Education and Social Studies, where issues, our past cultures and experiences were read and taught. To be honest, how many of us (after more than a decade) still remember or practice those things? For example, the last time I sang our National anthem was during National Day 2009.

But then, Total Defence isn’t just about showing care or love for our nation. It’s about the individuals too. It’s how all these little things we do come together to form the great nation.

I feel that the “I Will” outreach may be a good place to get people here spreading about the many little things they do and at the same time, people can encourage family and friends to follow and pledge too! Hope the website will continue to grow after Total Defence Day. It’ll be interesting to see the pledges that people here support.

Oh! And do you know that there is the Total Defence 2010’s “I Will” Man – in the form of a videologram standee – traveling between key public transport hubs around Singapore asking people to visit www.iwill.sg? Have you spotted him?

I did spot him standing alone at Dhoby Ghaut NEL station. Quite lonely leh. Why not go spot his locations and give him a big wave will ya?

Go submit your pledge and share it with us! I’ll go support ok?

Did I mention there are attractive prizes to be won too?

Something’s fishy in this team of Yellow-Earthworms. Three girls and a guy. Hmm… and I heard there might just be some love blooming…

No, of course I’m not going into details on that! Gui Ju, May Ping, Yi Lin and Yi Xiang are the four Yellow-Earthworms we’re talking about. They took part in N.E.mation III but didn’t perform that well, and this year, they’re back for their final season before they focus all their attention in their A levels.

The three girls are big fans of ‘The Post-it girl’. I asked if the only guy in the team, Yi Xiang, knows what the show was about, and he scratched his head and gave me the big “Huh?” look. -_-” Anyway, the love for the show is one of the reasons why these Yellow-Earthworms chose to play with lots of post-its during their production weeks! I’m huge fan of post-its too!

Just for a short period of time, I’m feeling this strong sense of belonging with these four Yellow-Earthworms. They seem to have this power that makes me get attracted to them and makes me feel like a long-lost friend. And soon you will have lots of fun with them. That’s how I felt when I interacted with them.

Just like in all dramas, things happen. There’s fun and joy and there are tears and disappointment as well. Mayping and Gui Ju had to leave the team for an overseas trip to China for a Bilingual Culture Study Program. As it was a compulsory trip, both of them had to bid goodbye to the team with heavy hearts. Through they’ve left, I am very sure that their commitment and support is still strong for the Yellow-Earthworms!

Onboard the team now are Wei Jie and Yeling. (Yes! Another Yeling! But one with an e and g. Confusing huh?) The two are very excited to be part of this journey. With their enthusiasm and commitment to the team, they’re going to help Mayping and Gui Ju win this thing! They ARE very positive yio! That’s the spirit we’re looking for!

After creating their animation sequence in Toom Boom Studio, they had to create their own “post-its” as the colors they require for their production are not readily available in store. So they spent lots of time cutting and spraying glue onto the 5cm x 5cm colored papers. There were thousands of such pieces created.

Their production consists of the standard stop-motion and also pixilation. The main highlight in their clip is the huge post-it wall where their animation sequence takes place. Each scene tells a story of how people use post-its to show care and pasting it everywhere.

Aren’t you curious to see what the Yellow-Earthworms had created? Go to the N.E.mation 4 website now to view and vote for them!

RandomAcademy is made up of four girls with a common yet interesting story behind them. Yuqing, Fuying, Xinyan and Ruoxi are from Raffles Institute (Junior College). These four girls are all students from different part of China! What makes this team unique is not just their nationality but how much they share the need to show care for Singapore. They feel that being away from home and having spent so many years in Singapore, they tend to see things that are often ignored by Singaporeans, and this is what they’ve captured in their animation clip!

This team wants to tell their story through different pairs of feet. Theyshow the story of care from a boy through his growth to become an adult. During his journey, he experiences different kinds of situations but no matter where or what he was doing, he is always concerned and cares about his home in Singapore.

During their pitch to the judges, they had their hands in different pairs of shoes, and acted out their story from the view of the camera. The two girls who were acting as the “feet” had to slide their hands between different pairs of shoes at each scene! Hope they had the shoes cleaned before the pitch!

Being in the top 20 hadn’t been very easy for these girls. During the week of qualifying training period, these girls had to juggle between the 6 full days at NYP learning the fundamentals of animation and preparation for their SuperPitch!, and they also had to find time between all these commitments to prepare for their promotional examinations which was in two weeks’ time. They were all glad that they were able to manage their time and work well.

During the production period, these girls were always hard at work, tracing and drawing their animation, frame-by-frame. This group is working on rotoscoping, where they acted out their animation and then recorded with a video camera, after which they converted their video into frame-by-frame stills. And from these stills, they had to trace the images to to create their frame-by-frame animation.

Here’s an example of how a rotoscope animation will look like.

Now that you know a little more about these four girls, you might also want to follow RandomAcademy on their facebook fan page to show your support for them by VOTING for their clip!!! I wish them all the best in this competition and I hope they’ve all learned new skills and knowledge through this journey.

加油噢！

Team Spoof from Methodist Girls’ School are back again for N.E.mation! Formerly known as Perspectives who brought you this clip…

Now that they are in Sec 3, they didn’t want to miss their last chance to come back as a team, so they submitted their story idea for this year’s N.E.mation! and worked very hard to get their story idea fine-tuned to fight for their spot in the top 10.

Being back for the second time, they managed to survive the qualifying week with ease and were more prepared and confident during their SuperPitch!. However, after they got selected for the top 10, they were asked to push beyond their previous year’s limit. Not wanting to just do what they’ve done last season, the four girls, Eleanor, Jean, Carmen and Elizabeth, took up the challenge and went ahead with a mix of rotoscoping and stopmotion animation.

Having gone through the production week with all the ten teams, this is one of the most challenging and time consuming production amongst the other finalists. And because of their determination to give their best, they have been pushing and working every minute they can get to get their production going.

Let me briefly bring you through their production process…

First the team had to film their footage and then do the frame-by-frame rotoscoping of the characters moving in their animation.

Then each frame of the moving character is being printed out, pasted onto cardboards and then cut out one by one. When animating them one at each frame, it will create a moving 2D figure on the set which they’d handmade from lots of cutting and drawing.

The above is from one of the scenes in their animation. Yes, these girls made those tiny vehicles and life-like models of the Singapore cityscape!

They even constructed a scene from olden days Singapore.

Not only were they able to bring you the past, they also brought you the future! They have got the currently still building-in-progress IR, The Marina Bay Sands, up on their set! Nice right?

This brief rundown of their production is no way near the actual work these girls have gone through. If you were there to see for yourself, the mess at their workspace and the amount of work they had to do, you will surely be very impressed.

As they have all been busy producing their work, they had little time to update their facebook page and rally for friends to support them. So if you like what you see so far, go support them on facebook now! Not only that, but VOTE for them!!

With the previous season’s team from their school winning the competition, the DreamTeam, representing Yishun Junior College, is here to give N.E.mation! a shot. Will the school be able to bring home the champion trophy again? Only the judges and you, the voters, will have a say!

Meiling, Samuel and Dhanesh from Yishun JC started their N.E.mation! journey with no stress. They are here to learn and gain experience, instead of focusing too much on winning.

Their animation clip is based on our human circulatory system. Get ready to watch your blood cells, muscles and body system come to life in their animated story. Through how the circulatory system works, they will relate it with real life instances where care is shown. Sounds complex right? Just go and see the cute watery eyes from the muscles! In fact, you can catch a glimpse of it over at Razor TV.

I got the opportunity to sit down with them for a chat when they were taking their break during the production phase to find out more about this Dream Team…

If your team was made up of cartoon characters, what will your character be?

Dhanesh was given the role of Wiley Coyate, the one who tries very hard to catch the Road Runner but fails all the time. The example they told me was when Dhanesh tried to draw a scene for their 2D animation, he tried over and over again but after multiple changes, he still couldn’t get it right. He admits it too!

The team had a hard time trying to come up with an appropriate character for Samuel. He is very outgoing and is always thinking positive. He tries to act a lot but fails. After much discussion, we decided to call him Goofy. Cause we felt that it matches the way he carries himself.

Meiling was the strongest and most hardworking one in the team. The guys both agreed that if she wasn’t in the team, all the illustrations wouldn’t have been doable. Meiling was known as Lisa, the smartest in the Simpson’s family. She is very mature and always the leader in action.

The Dream Team pushed themselves through the three weeks of production with the common goal of wanting to see their fruits of labour. They told me that all of them can’t draw before this, and they are here to push their limits and learn how to illustrate and create their characters as best as they can.

You be the judge and see if their limit is enough to win them that trip to USA! All the best Dream Team! May the muscles be with you!

Now that voting has started, let’s get to know all our teams better! And no, this post is not featuring all the N.E.mation! participants from this season! It’s for the team who called themselves the N.E.mators!

Sherlyn, Shandy and Dorna from Guangyang Secondary survived their three weeks of production with lots of ups and downs. But they managed to overcome all odds and completed their stop-motion animation on time!

These girls created a rap to portray the types of care one can find in a hawker centre setting, these girls did their animation with paper cut-outs and animated their story with AniMaker Basic.

One of the challenges for this team was the cutting out of their entire setup and characters out of paper. From big characters to the tiny bones of the chicken drumsticks. These girls also created their own version of the two dollar bill!

Another challenge they faced was the lack of a team member, Dorna, who couldn’t stay throughout the day during the production weeks due to family commitment. Sherlyn and Shandy had to hold the fort while Dorna was away. These two sisters both had put in a lot of effort into their creation. Sherlyn the younger of the two is always cheerful and full of energy. I love how she always gives me her chirpy greetings when we meet! Shandy, being the elder sister, she is more mature and tends to tire herself out fast. Despite the two different personalities, both of them complement one another very well throughout the production process.

Hope their catchy rap tune and cute animated paper cut-outs will be able to attract the public to vote for their animation.

Good luck girls!

Finalists from N.E.mation! III had a week to study and immerse themselves in learning 3D animation with the lecturers at DigiPen during their December school holidays. And from the looks of it, they had fun creating characters and learning animation from the friendly and motivating lecturers there. Read what they’ve got to say about their experience…

What did you learn at the workshop?

Charlotte: “A lot more about what goes on behind mega animated movies like Mulan and the Lion King. You never really realise the amount of effort that goes behind just a simple shake of the hand. Though N.E.mation! did give us a taste of what 2D animation was like, 3D animation proved to be a totally different challenge. I readily concluded that what drove great animators was simply their passion.”

Nicole: “I learnt how to model a figure/character in the software 3D Max and it was super fun!! I also got to experience how industry professionals work! We had hands on experience..it was difficult at first, but…IT WAS SO WORTH IT!! WOOHOO!!“

What is the one thing that is (or will always be) stuck in your mind which you’d learnt from the workshop?

Kyoko: “The one thing that will always be stuck in my mind which I learnt from the workshop is probably how the computer is just a useful tool for animation and that one has to still learn how to do most of the animation and modelling by hand before progressing to the computer. This stuck because of two reasons. The first being that it was continuously stressed on, from the first to the last day. The second reason is because it is an interesting and sensible concept as the course has shown me.“

Charlotte: “Curved lines make the heros or the happier characters while straight, sharper lines or shapes create villians. You don’t really realise these subtleties until experts like those at DigiPen point them out for you. I’d say it opens up your eyes, for you really start to notice these little things more attentively.“

Nicole: “Drawing and sketching skills! And also character design! I loved it!! Because I’m very into drawing… another thing I won’t forget is that I left my beloved pencil there!!! But since they actually taught us to try not to use an eraser, my “drawing straightaway with pen” improved!! YAY!“

What did you enjoy most about the workshop at DigiPen?

Kyoko: “I enjoyed the drawing session the most as it boosted my confidence in myself and taught me many invaluable skills in drawing. Moreover, we were working really fast and the pace was exciting and invigorating.“

Charlotte: “It would be the drawing class on the 3rd day. Drawing sketches of the anatomy in just 10 seconds was a sheer shock for many of us. It does sound whacked but the live model did really switch his pose after 10 seconds. It was amazing just looking at how our mentor was able to whip up a beautiful and decipherable figure in such a short time.“

Nicole: “I enjoyed practically everything! But if you mean the really super super enjoy one, then it would have to be the drawing/sketching/character design! Because I’m the kind of person who needs a pencil or some writing tool on my hand… Ha! I’m weird! P.S. there’s a pencil beside my bed!“

Will you consider taking up a course to further your skill/ knowledge in animation at DigiPen?

Kyoko: “Yes. I enjoyed myself there and with the facilities, instructors and the lessons learnt, I think that it is a good institute for furthering one’s ambitions and dreams in animation.“

Charlotte: “No, not for me. Personally, drawing may be a hobby but not something I’ll pursue. I don’t really have the “passion” like the trainers at DigiPen. I can sense their burning passion!“

Nicole: “Maybe? I think, after all, I got to experience a bit of stuff there and it was fun, though I heard the students there saying it was tough! I love animation, drawing, character design, 3D modelling, and if possible, I would also like to include clay modelling, games design, cartoon making and ANIME too!“

Wow! Looks like these girls enjoyed the workshop at DigiPen! I can really feel their excitement from what they’ve got to say! If you are interested to dive deeper into the world of animation, you may want to take a look at the DigiPen website.