The second 3Dami event was hosted at UCL from Thursday July 25th through to Friday August 2nd 2013. Over forty students aged 15-18 applied for the studio by submitting a portfolio; seventeen of these students were selected and tasked with running their own animation studio, to create a film from storyboard to final editing, all in the course of 7 days. Each day was supposed to run from 9am to 5pm, with an hour for lunch, but the more enterprising students arrived as we did and finished at 7pm, when security politely asked us to all leave!

The event ran as follows:

Thursday – Lecture on film theory, followed by script writing and storyboarding.

Friday – Lecture on using blender in teams and asset list creation. The students started work on their shorts, including the creation of an animatic from their storyboards.

Weekend – break, some students sharpened their skills with tutorials.

Monday – Voting in of director and producer. Character started.

Tuesday – Characters rigged, assets finished, sets made.

Wednesday – Animation started, shots created, music composed.

Thursday – Lecture from SAE London, followed by pizza! Animation finished, shots created.

Friday – Polishing and compositing. Presentation at UCL Christopher Ingold Theatre.

To assist us in our work we had support from Steve, Dean, David and Kate at UCL Engineering / UCL Computer Science, Amy at NESTA, Paul and Dan at SAE London, Kim at UKIE, Craig from Jiggy Creationz, Dominic Connor and Monica Butetsi.

We had 22 workstations and a 36 node render farm built by Tom with the assistance of Denis and Nigel, that made short work of rendering the films.