This is a very short animation I created for the Blender Artists Animation Challenge 39 (“All I Want for Christmas” theme):
Title: “All I Want”
File size: 2.8MB
Length: 30 seconds
Codec/Format: XVid/avi
Audio/music: By me
The penguin was a character I developed Saturday for the Blender Artists Weekend Challenge (“Penguins Don’t Poker” theme). I rigged him mainly for posing purposes in the static scene, but then I just had to animate him.
I’ve been working more on animations lately (with the big one being Beautiful Music, which is still very much a WIP). Between late last night and early this morning I put together this little animation. About 7 hours went into this (render time not included). The reason for the compressed timeframe was the challenge deadline, which has since been extended.
Some technical notes:
Everything was done in one continuous take with camera switching handled through a simple camera switching script I made a while back. Normally, workflow is more modular, with individual scenes handled separately, especially in longer animations, but I tend to prefer this workflow in certain cases, as was the case with my recent “Snakebot” animation for an earlier challenge.
Layer keys were used to move objects in and out of the view, such as the two particle snow systems.
Music clips are from a Christmas-themed instrumental I composed a couple of weeks ago.
Blender 2.42 optimized was used. VirtualDub was used to combine audio and video and re-compress animation for web viewing. For audio I used Audacity.
All motions were hand-keyed. No NLA was needed. Shape keys were used for the blinks and then controlled through IPOs. Lip-syncing was done by scrubbing audio in Blender and setting keys for the mouth bones.
It was a fun and challenging little project, and I just might have to use this character again 
RobertT