Hello, humans from Newgrounds;

I'll take this newspost to share some sort of "recap" on the end of this year's NATA tournament;

Turns out this brainmelting tournament was finally won by StejkRobot;

The theme was to "Animate in the style of your Opponent"; and I must say he made a pretty memorable 'impression'.

He went to levels of production that I don't think I have achieved yet with my works, and it was cool to see those relatively "familiar" creatures on their own trippy atmosphere; despite being something I can still call different.

How do I explain it; it's like when you play a fighting game with a more experienced friend, and he chooses to play with your 'main' character (the one you use the most) and starts doing new and insane tricks with it.

'Chicken Castle'

On the other hand, taking Stejk's works as reference was a huge challenge aswell;

The original idea was to make something darker and heavier on atmosphere; but as I went experimenting with characters and backgrounds; I was getting to the point where I wasn't making much progress and wasn't going to get that much time to properly (learn to) develop them all.

At the end; I decided to reflect Stejk's works in a higher level of detail, more action-based scenes (than my previous works), and, for the most part, the design of the protagonist (a human being!), and for the sake of contrast (and fun) make that character endure in a very "butzbo-ish" scenario. It's a bit ironic because it's in a way a 'battle' between both sides.

(the pic at the right is a REALLY early sketch of the characters, the stylization is pretty different too).

Animating a human was a pretty difficult task, and this may sound redundant because it's a regular thing for animators to begin with (most NATA submissions had human characters after all!). Humans with human noses, mouths, hair, ears, and hands, all of them moving at certain points.Compare that (and the most detailed characters in general) to most of my "protagonists" from the earlier rounds, which are as simple (and rounded-deformed) as possible to be able to animate them properly in the really short deadlines, and you'll see why this was a new thing.

Since I wasn't so glad with the animation of my last short, I wanted to deliver as much as possible in that aspect; which led me to not taking that many "risks" with style decissions.

Despite ending up second, the overall response of the judges was pretty good and open-minded to this different take on the theme. While there's no point trying to tell if one "style" was "easier/harder" than the other one, since it's a pretty relative term (it was definitively a challenge for both); I needed to improve a lot in terms of overall skills in an attempt at refferencing Stejk's work, so it was a pretty 'educational' process in that sense.

At least to the point where the animation is done, I guess it's probably my most 'elaborated' animation to date (animation was made through 6-7 days each day busier than the last). And luckily I had enough time on the last hours to make a functional sound mix!

So; it was a fantastic tournament after all; Through these last months, we had to find a missing sock ; traveled through an enormous eye ;  threw our heads off in despair; went to a bizarre cereal dimension and rescued a helpless worm.

I think I'll take a break from making shorts for a while; On the other hand I would like to tackle some 'darker' themes that I hoped to try on last round, but couldn't elaborate in the given time.

I actually have a few ideas for games; I think (as some reviewers have commented aswell) that many of my NATA animations could evolve into games of some sort.

With that said; thanks for taking the time to read up to this point, and for watching all of those animated meltdowns, I hope you had enjoyed the tournament, as an animator, spectator, organizer, judge, replicant or human being!

Well that was long; any comment, question, suggestion, paranormal breakfast experience, whatever, feel free to share!

Now here's your reward: