EMAIL: glenn@mccarters.net
NAME: Glenn McCarter
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
TITLE: A Snowball's Chance
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED:
  Microsoft Excel (project management)
  POV-Ray editor (all scene development, modeling, and animation)
  Paint Shop Pro (sleigh graphics; batch convert raw .png frames to .jpg)
  JPGVideo (convert .jpg frames to .avi animation)
  MovieDV by aist.com (editing, soundtrack, convert to .mpg)

CREATION TIME: countless hours in development, 14h 50m to render frames, 
  3-days to edit and add sound effects
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 800 MHZ

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
  This animation is encoded at 320 x 240 resolution, 30 frames per second
  and has a sound track.

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
The Bermuda bobsled team is the laughing stock of the World Cup circuit.
They have almost no chance of winning the World Championships because they
don't have enough speed.  But speed is just distance over time.  They cannot
improve their time, but maybe fate will affect their distance...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
This animation has 40 shots, with roughly 3000 frames rendered.
The anim was first "storyboarded" in an Excel spreadsheet,
detailing the sequence, timing, number of frames, sled speed, etc.
for each shot. I moved the timing data from Excel into a master
POV-Ray file.  This file then calls each scene file in turn.

All of the models were built by me for this animation, and are
included in the zipfile.  Height fields make up the terrain,
while everything else are CSG constructions.  The sled has
an image mapped paint job.

Everything was animated by hand-coding.  I apologize for the many crude
motions, but I am pleased with how some of the snow and sled effects
came out.  My goal was to tell a complete story, not necessarily to
create perfectly fluid motion.

I edited the animation in MovieDV, adding transitions and
sound effects.  There are up to five layers of sound in some areas.
The audio comes from many sources, including home recordings, a synth,
and two collections of sound fx files.

To enhance the sense of speed, I structured the animation
such that early shots have longer times and limited movement,
while later shots have quicker cuts and speedy motion.
Sorry about the poor quality of the video encoding -- I'm very
unhappy with the .avi and .mpg encoding tools I'm using.

I hope you enjoyed "A Snowball's Chance"!  Looking forward to your
comments.