Animation News Australia

NodeFest Ident Competition: Get Voting!

Written by Jumbla Creative | Sep 1, 2016

Don’t have time to read this article? No worries, just head to http://woobox.com/5rycma/gallery?web=1 to vote for our entries!

The event season in the creative world is well and truly underway – and the next in the lineup is Node Fest, held at Melbourne’s own Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Node Fest is Australia’s premier motion graphics event, which brings together the best in the industry to share insights and inspiration with fellow players in the business. This year, there’s a stellar lineup of speakers, and attendees score the opportunity to network with an amazing bunch of motion graphics big shots – and what creative event is complete without a free goodie bag?

But the goodie bag isn’t even the most exciting part of the festival (we know – big call). Also featured in the event is Node’s Ident Competition, which encourages industry professionals – as well as animation students – to show off their motion graphics skills. The competition requires entrants to submit a 10 to 15 second video, featuring the Node logo – and naturally, Jumbla couldn’t resist the opportunity to showcase the insane skill of our animators.

So instead of just entering one, we entered 2. That’s right, two separate entries for your viewing enjoyment.

The first one, created by Kane, one of our motion designers, is pretty awesome. We asked him to elaborate on his inspiration for the clip, and how he went about creating it.

‘Nodes, when used in motion graphics, are effects that change and manipulate scenes. We really wanted to use that idea in the animation. Because of the time constraints, I wanted to play to my strengths, so doing something that was predominantly character-based with some humour injected into it seemed like a good fit.

‘The process for this one was a lot different to how we generally approach an animation. Usually we would do styles and storyboards, get them signed off by the client, then start animating – but seeing as with this project there was no need for any of the preproduction stages, we pretty much just jumped straight in and started animating.

‘The concept was already there, but I developed the different scenarios as I went. The main intention was to have each scenario representing something that is commonly used or experienced in VFX and motion graphics.

‘We also threw some easter eggs in there, like the glitch with the sheep ‘baa’ at the end – which is only something that people who work in the industry would understand. It was just another way for us to tie it back and reference motion designers, and also add in some extra humour.’

Check out Kane’s work below:

Our second video, created by Cal, our Creative Direction took a slightly different approach. “I just wanted to keep it simple. I had a look at some of the entries and a lot of them are pretty cool, but I felt they were very much motion responses as opposed to logo animations (including one we previously did), so I thought I’d create something that was simple, looked cool and could easily be used by the Festival across anything. I also liked the idea of creating something that was loopable – so that’s what I’ve done here!” You can check it out here:

Voting for the best idents opened today so get voting! And don’t worry, you don’t have to choose, you can vote for both of our entries! Just head here: VOTE NOW (Make sure you vote for ours and not confuse it with anyone elses!)

Voting is open to everyone throughout the world, and it’s in your best interest to head to the polls – one lucky voter will be drawn at random to receive a prize when the competition winners are announced.