Art Festival - for your consideration

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

From OceanEffects to Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation and Orange studio.

We have decided to post this open letter because we have found some major mistakes in Suzanne Awards.

At first - placing submissions on public forum was a worst way of dealing such matter. People had to face tremondous costs of bandwidth (our animation - The Trap was downloaded over 40 000 times, we have to pay for that just because we let everyone to download it). Some folks ran out of bandwith before their submissions were sent to the jugdes.
Another thing that we find wrongful and unjust is that one animation could be nominated in just one category.

The thing that was the most unfair in our opinnion is nominating animations that were not submitted in the official thread on www.elysiun.com.

“Submit animations here before October 7, 2005.” - this is a quote from Elysiun post where submissions should be placed.

We have browsed this thread a lot of times but we did not find anything about this animations:

  • Plumiferos
  • The Goat, the Boy and the Sun

We have nothing against people who created this artworks, but in every art festival and contest there are rules that should be obeyed equally for all contestants. How come animations not submited officially are nominated to the award? Are they favoured in some way?

The Blender Conference will start tomorrow so nothing can be done to fix this mistakes, but we would like to ask for more professional approach while preparing that kind of contest in the future.

Regards

Piotr Kosmala (ODEON FILM STUDIO & OFX) & Michael Krupa (OCEANEFFECTS)

2

I am sorry. But I completly disagree with your post.

This it, you want it or not, the official blender community. It’s not just an open forum, it’s one of the central point of Blender. Without this community, blender wouldn’t be much so it is NORMAL to have the post about the suzanne award here.

As far as the two other, what if those people actually had almost no bandwith? What if they TRIED to ask robertt by email to know if they could send their anim in private so they wouldn’t lose their bandwith? Next time, think and ask by email instead of letting your bandwith in the hand of the community. Maybe Robertt should have mentionned you could email (I vaguely remember him saying this, but I can’t find it back so maybe I’m wrong), but you could have too. Also you could have asked people to mirror your file, this is a open community, people usually help each other remember?

Then, what the hell are you ranting about, you are one of the nominee, you should be happy as hell to be considered in the elites of the blenderhead.

Also, nominated in more than one? What the fuck is up with you? The blender foundation try to promote the most artist as possible, and it’s not by giving everything to a single person or group that this will happen. And what if they really thought 1 animation wasn’t good enough to fill all the category?

They sure could have had a neat little website with forms to fill etc… but was it really needed? no. This worked out quite well in my opinion. And above all, I don’t htink they have someone at their disposal with enough time to code a such a nice little website…maybe you are up for the task for next year???

Stop ranting about who is about to give you prizes…instead, just tell them a big Thank you like everything is doing, because that’s what they deserve.

I can’t believe you wrote such a post…I will stop here before saying things I shouldn’t.

3

rules are rules and should be obeyed no matter if we are community of Blenderheads or Community of breeding-mashrooms-in-your-basement.

This it, you want it or not, the official blender community. It’s not just an open forum, it’s one of the central point of Blender. Without this community, blender wouldn’t be much so it is NORMAL to have the post about the suzanne award here.

We did not said that placing submissions here was wrong, we wanted to say that there are animations in the contest that were not submitted here.

4

for your information, I was writing this in reply to:

At first - placing submissions on public forum was a worst way of dealing such matter

…

About the rules, yes ok they should be obeyed. But still, the 2 animations that weren’t posted nin the thread were shown at siggraph2005 if I recall correctly. so it was praticly certain they’d be in the art festival. Anyhow I understand the rule should have been applied to both of them…but

Why in hell are you ranting about that? you are nominated…are you afraid of being beaten? It’s not like there is 100 000$ in the end. 250$ for a studio isn’t really that much helpful anyway (sure I wouldn’t say no to it…)…and just being nominated is a great promotion in itself no? it does show that you’re in the best of the bests…

5

we don’t talk about money! we talk about rules

the rule should have been applied to both of them

I am happy that You agree with us :slight_smile: stay cool guy and don’t think that we want someting bad for our great community :wink:

6

Hi! Just a few things I want to point out:

My simple role here was to help Ton announce the contest here and try to coordinate the submission process, helping out to answer questions in the thread.

If anyone had any questions or issues they were encouraged to post them in the animation thread or attempt to pm someone.

This is the first time I’m hearing of those two other submissions. Ton and Project Orange are in charge of the contest, so all that stuff is up to them of course.

No one other than Stefano Selleri wrote to me concerning bandwidth problems, and I hosted two of his animations temporarily at my website until the judging concludes. They were very small though, and I have bandwidth limits too, which is why I used free video hosts.

One user’s animation (KH) was not downloadable by BF, and Toni wrote to me. I got a reply from that user with an alternative link and sent it immediately to Toni. That was the only problem reported to me since I sent Ton the submission information from the thread on Saturday.

Toni did not write to me again to indicate any other animations were not downloadable.

As far as the rules were concerned, anyone in disagreement with them could have contacted Ton/BF before the deadline. Ton is a busy guy, but he’s a fair, patient, intelligent, and considerate guy too, always making time for all sorts of questions and suggestions.

The contest was announced in July, so there was plenty of time to address potential issues in the months between.

Concerning bandwidth, two large video files for The Trap ("69 MB (MOV), 18 MB (MPG2)) would easily consume a lot of bandwidth even if just 100 people viewed them, which is why some contestants made use of existing free video hosts such as Ourmedia.org, Archive.org, and Google Video.

On the bright side it seems you are going to be very famous! :smiley: And that would be well deserved.

I hope you are very happy with your fine achievement. It’s definitely one of the best Blender animations I’ve seen. I’m glad you were nominated too :slight_smile:

Best of luck in the contest!

RobertT

7

Not to get lawyery, but “submit animations here” does not equal “submit animation here and only here”. The first is a statement of affirmative fact. You CAN submit animations here. It is not exclusive. Had they used the second statement, that would have been exclusive.

When I read the intial post, I understood it to be an invitation, not a comprehensive explanation of the rules of the contest. Hopefully, the Blender community and foundation will not succumb to the kind of hair-splitting lawyerism that leads to people griping about the rules in what is really an informal situation.

Do we really want to BF to start having to hire a lawyer for stuff like this? I sure don’t.

8

pfff, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’…

I’m just very curious about ‘Plumiferos’ and ‘The Goat, the Boy and the Sun’. Is there a place I can find them?

Hmmm, you were nominated, right? You big suckup :smiley:

Anyhow, congrats all for being nominated, and good luck.

Sago

9

Also, nominated in more than one? What the **** is up with you? The blender foundation try to promote the most artist as possible, and it’s not by giving everything to a single person or group that this will happen. And what if they really thought 1 animation wasn’t good enough to fill all the category?

Ok - I’ll try to explain it to you as best as I can:

We have about 40 animations submitted to the contest, all of them are good or bad in some field. Now, let’s assume that everything is being made the way it should be made and we’ve got three categories, three awards to win. The jugdes take 3 animations from those 40 and says:
This has the best character animation,
this is the best in artistic way
and this has the best story/idea.

And what happened instead of this? Orange splitted contestants into three small groups, saying:
“You will fight for this award,
You will fight for this award,
and You will fight for this award”
This leads to the sytuation when we have four the best (in my opinnion) animations set together in one box? Now this is weird, especially when we have to compete with “New Penguoen” for an award for the best story, when env created great character animation and we have concetrated on “artistic impressions” field?

You are probably asking yourself why do we thing that organisation of Suzanne Awards is harmful and unfair?
That is why: there is only one prize in every category, and every animation can be nominated in just one of them. I was the character animator in “The Trap” project, I’ve spent almost 4 weeks, 15h per day in front of the computer to complete this project, animate is as best as I can, than why in the world I can’t compete with the author of in example “Cycles” animation (no offence, nothing personal) where, I think my animation is far far better. I’d like to face env or guys from Studio Manos Digitales in that area. I’m sure that Peter, who was a director and coordinator of our movie would like to fight for Best Animation Artwork, because he made really great effort making our movie the way it is (he did lightning, compositing, scenario, shootingboard, everything).

I guess all of you missunderstood our intentions while we were writing this letter. We don’t want to win every prize in this contest, especially that with such a great artworks being submitted that would be really hard to do. We also don’t care about money. We wouldn’t actually know what to do with them in case we win some, because there was many, many people who helped us for free, and if we would like to keep the prize would have to share it with them to be fair (and belive me, to pay for the sound studio that we’ve had for free we would have to win 3 or 4 Suzanne Awards, and I don’t even mention renderfarm costs or bandwidth).
So you see it’s not about the money.

I know that the Blender Foundation is trying to promote the as many artists as possible, but it is doing that by harming the others.

10

hmmm, it’s true that I was trying to ‘understand’ why certain works were nominated for a category. But I was also trying to figure out what those categories were really about, what the differences are (which is quite understandible now, looking back at it).
I can’t disagree with you about a work only being nominated for just one category. I won’t call it wrongfull and unjust, but illogical. Even though a work is great in all 3 categories, it can never get more than 1 nomination. Who or what to decide? Don’t know. And why? Promoting as many artists as possible sounds like a good reason to me. But maybe there are different and better ways to get this done.
In the end I believe everyone gets what they deserve (or won’t get what they don’t deserve). And besides, somehow we’re still in the beginning process of this whole ‘Suzanne Award for Animations’ thing. Things will change, year by year. Babysteps at a time.

11

Sago: Haha, no, Ton’s actually that great of a guy :smiley: I’m curious about those other animations too. I hope we get to see them. And, yes, baby steps.

Everyone else:

All anyone had to do was write to Ton, and I’m sure he would have been open minded and understanding. How might I know? Just one of many examples: after sending Ton the link to Apollux’s thread at CGTalk, Ton said something like “he could have written to me.” Ton may be busy beyond belief, but he still makes time for everyone.

Ton’s trying to do something nice and special for the community and for Blender and the Foundation. Not everyone may be universally pleased by his decisions, but that’s the way it will always be of course.

Looking back, it was on September 10th, Ton wrote:

I’ve decided to limit the Suzanne Award presentation and festival to animations only. And this in three categories;

Best Animation, original idea and story
Best Character Animation
Best Animation Artwork

That was over a month ago.

I think if anyone had any reservations about the contest, it would have been more constructive to contact Ton directly then while the contest was underway, not indirectly and after the contest has closed.

And as Ecks pointed out, this is an open community, not a but the Blender community. People can talk to each other and help one another out. This was an invitational event, open to all. Yes, it would have been great if BF had a powerful server and a website capable of uploading and hosting all these videos, and maybe the contest can evolve in that regard.

With all the new animations bound to be inspired by the next Blender, video hosting issues may continue to increase for our community. Ourmedia.org and Archive.org are free, but the submission process and periodic slowdowns aren’t so good for long/hi-res animations.

Putfile is not a real option if their claim to your creation’s rights remains in effect. Google Video is interesting and free at the moment, but its recompression and re-formatting videos as Flash media is not so great. We could certainly use more options.

I have suggested in the past that, as a premium membership service, that BF might consider establishing a separate file server for the community. We have image uploading at Elysiun now, but not limitless bandwidth.

So what I’d personally like to see is people pulling together and coming up with more solutions for things like video hosting. I’m sure lots of things can and will be improved, including the contest and future entries for it.

As for the rest, I’m sure Ton will comment on all the other stuff, as I’ve directed him to this thread.

Without him, there would be no contest to speak of and none of this would even be possible.

RobertT

12

I have to agree with Robertt. The times I’ve contacted Ton, he’s been really nice. Always willing to listen.

Also, while from a logistics standpoint the way that the competition is set up might not be the best, this really was the wrong way to go about criticizing it. Maybe next year, you all will have some extra time and will volunteer to organize the awards.

It sounds like you put in tons of hard work on your animation. When I have a lot of time/effort/resources tied up in something, I always try to proactive about it. That means: asking questions when something seems off, going to the top when people appear to playing under a different set of rules than you, and most of all, taking care of things up front, not after the fact.

The BFers are doing the best they can with the time and resources they have.

13

Robertt:

All anyone had to do was write to Ton

I think if anyone had any reservations about the contest, it would have been more constructive to contact Ton directly then while the contest was underway, not indirectly and after the contest has closed.

People can talk to each other and help one another out.

Harkyman:

The times I’ve contacted Ton, he’s been really nice. Always willing to listen.

going to the top when people appear to playing under a different set of rules than you, and most of all, taking care of things up front, not after the fact.

These are second nature to you and I, but, alas, there are still places in the world where “these are the rules” means exactly that. Where dictatorships and quazi Communist governments made the rules and then gave the spoils to their cronies. People who live in that part of the world have been led to beleive that its different in the West. Having the organizers stick to the published rules may just be a prize more valuable than the prize itself.

%<

14

I wonder how you managed to pull all that shit out of your ass. Not only is it offensive, it’s also complete bullshit. Rules are set up to be obeyed, and if you want your rules to be vague, then why bother making them at all? If you can’t cope with the overhead of following your own rules, then you should reconsider the seriousness and “professionality” of what you’re offering. Get down from your ivory tower and quit being an arrogant fuck about your inadequate opinions of other people’s viewpoints. Blaming other countries’ governments for your own incompetence is pitiful at the least. Get your act straight, for fuck’s sake. Either stick to the rules or change them so that they are manageable! Don’t blame the GOVERNMENT for it, you loser! I can’t believe you wrote that shit. It makes me doubt that there are intelligent beings in that stuck up country you come from. (How’s that for insulting your country, dipshit.)

15

~_~ guys come on!!! Peace on Earth here! I’d love setup a website for submissions next year!

Also I already host a few poeple, but a way to consider bandwidth if the gud old, bit torrent. I love blender with all my hearts and cells ^_-, I try to share as much as possible.

I really cant see why to argue personally if your animation is so freaking good, go get reconzied @ cgtalk, Suzanna awards are nice, but so are cgtalk’s ^-. Reconizition shouldn’t come from rules, but dignity and respect. If you are too lose cmpetition because there was a loophole then dont go blaming the people, go about another method. Rules are meant to be tested against people, if they dont work out, then there’s a riot, on inwhich seems to be happening. Revolation is upon us ~~, poor Ton.

16

Agreeing more and more with Sago here.

As Harkyman and Ecks correctly pointed out, there was nothing absolute and dictatorial (“you must” or “here and only here”) about the submission guidelines (with “should” used consistently, as far as wording goes), which is why guidelines were presented as “What Is Wanted” instead of “This Is How It Should Be.” The invitation to participate in contest started back in July, so there was plenty of time to ask questions or make comments.

It was repeatedly mentioned Ton and Project Orange would ultimately be receiving all submissions and making all decisions regarding admissibility of entries. While I did not know about the two aforementioned animations now nominated, I doubt there was anything ulterior or necessarily “unfair” about those submissions: they did reach the intended recipients, just not throught the thread as would have been prefered.

Had Ton mentioned those other two animations to me I certainly would have added those entries quickly in the thread. The submission thread was simply created to help Ton collect submissions, nothing more. If someone somehow had e-mailed Ton submissions directly, if that were the case here, please remember Ton is after all the person in charge of the contest, the rules, and was ultimately in charge of forwarding submission information to Project Orange judges.

The process was as open, fair, and inclusive as it could possibly be within a forum like this: anyone could (and obviously did) write at any time if there were any questions or concerns. It was conducted similarly as the weekly animation and modeling contests are held at Elysiun, so it wasn’t some dramatic new format. It was kept deliberately simple and straightforward, and several times towards the end I asked people to check over their stuff and make sure everything was fine.

Now, if on the other had there were a simple web submission form instead of the public thread, none of us would even know who was submitting what for the contest, assuming we even had a right to know who was submitting what. That’s not always the case in different contests. In many contests out there beyond Elysiun it’s not always known who the contestants are. That would be a closed process (unless entries were later posted for public review like Ballistic Publishing does with submissions for their cg art books). Imagine the complaints Ton might have received towards the end if in the last hours before the deadline a bunch of entries were attempting to be uploaded and the server went down, or someone couldn’t upload fast enough. No universal solutions as far as that either.

Given the generally inclusive and supportive nature of our community, I think most of us would prefer as open a process as is possible, given the logistics of everything considered, but, once again, there will almost always be some form of mild or major disagreement during and afterwards.

I for one have faith in Ton and the Project Orange judges as far as fairness goes, and so should you. If in doubt, remember who these people are: basse, LohnC, @ndy for example – some of our greatest community leaders and beloved blenderheads!

I doubt anyone here believes those persons, our very friends and people whose very works we admire deeply, would knowingly engage in what might deemed to be unfair practices and go on to risk all they have created and fought for just so two other animations could get into the competition.

They’re all smarter than that, and so should everyone else be when discussing things like this contest.

RobertT

17

All movies we wanted to show during our animation festival were candidates for the awards. Plumiferos material we already had in, and the ‘goat, boy, sun’ trail I received artwork from in advance as well. He was late, but I thought was more than interesting enough to show today as well.

Needless to say, it was a great evening we had! I’m writing this just before i go to bed now… all movies we will put online on blender.org, also to save people from unnecessary bandwidhts.

Also the very nice orange trailer! :slight_smile:

18

So what I’d personally like to see is people pulling together and coming up with more solutions for things like video hosting.

Bit torrent.

19

I’m currently working on a PHP application which works in a similar way as bittorrent, except you use a webform for submission. If anybody’s interested in me developing this for a future Blender Animation contest, please PM me. If not, tell me off for being such a pretentious git for thinking I’m good enough for the job.