Posts Tagged "doritos"

Doritobots

Posted by TheZimp on Mar 19, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments

About a week ago I decided I wanted to join the Doritos Guru contest going on. Basically, it’s a contest where you submit a 30 second ad to Doritos and enter yourself in a chance to win $25,000 and 1% of all future sales of this new flavor. Pretty insane? No? What’s more insane than having only a week to do a commericial is deciding you want to ANIMATE THE WHOLE THING. Animation is HOLY FUCK time consuming. Let’s put it like this, I used to work for a company called Kutoka – we made educational videogames for kids. At Kutoka we were expected to deliver about 12 seconds of animation a week. That’s a 40 hour work week to produce 12 seconds of animation. At Pixar, animators are expected to deliver about 5 seconds a week. So, to decide a week before the deadline that I wanted to do a 30 second animated ad from scratch would probably get me a room next to Terminator 2′s Sarah Connor. On top of that I decided to go with an animation style I’ve never tried before. ERROR!!!11 DOES NOT COMPUTE!!!

I decided, fuck it, I’m gonna do it anyway. I stocked up on peach & mango fruit cups, coffee, leftover pizza, and made sure I had plenty of tunes along the way. My idea: two robots and a lack of communication ( I figured that having watched all 4 seasons of Futurama a gagillion times makes me an expert on robots). So, I got down and animated that bad boy.

It took quite a bit of time and I learned a lot about this new “method” of animation. I edited the thing together, rendered it, got some twitter friends to help me out with sound ( @wescrayfish ) and was able to pull the whole thing off. Now I’m just playing the waiting game. The whole Doritos Guru submission process is  pretty wonky (chalk it up for like 5 times I’ve used that word today). Basically, the deadline for submitting an ad and voting on ads are the same. Yes. If you submit an ad an hour before the deadline basically, you’ll get NO votes. Pretty weird in a contest that is supposedly based on people voting your video up. In either case, the voting seemed more like a popularity contest than whether an ad had artistic merit or not. There’s also a panel of judges that’ll pick the top 5. Apparently it’s 50/50 – votes/panel – but I doubt that. 

Anyways. Now I’m just waiting (im)patiently for my video to show up on their site and then we can all bask it’s warm glowing warming glow.