Since I get to animate for a living every day, I don’t get as much time as I’d like to work on my own animation projects. But my company is having a viral video contest this year, and I finally came up with what I thought was a good idea last week. The way the contest works is anyone at my work can submit videos to the company’s youtube channel, and the video with the most views at the end of the year wins a trip for two to New York.
My idea (and strategy) was to spoof a different, wildly popular, video on youtube. The video was of an 8-bit cat with a pop-tart body flying through the air with a rainbow coming off the back of him set to a catchy song. It looped the same animation for three and a half minutes, and that’s all it was. In less than three months it generated over 23 million views. So my idea was to combine this extremely simple animation with another trending internet topic: Captain America. The movie comes out later this month, and hopefully turning him into an 8-bit flying cartoon and attaching the animation to the same song as the pop-tart cat, I could generate enough views to win this competition. Take a look at the final product:
After showing it to my coworkers at our weekly meeting, most people seemed to be laughing simply because of how bizzarre the animation is. It didn’t look like many people had faith in my strategy. However, I’m happy to say that within 24 hours it has generated nearly 2,000 views, thanks in part to being featured on a large trending topics website. The video in first place has over 16,000 views, so I have some catching up to do. But that video aslo has been online for three months, so I think I still stand a chance. Hopefully I can get it featured on a few more websites and blogs and then I think I’ll be golden.
This actually was a lot of fun to make. I had never made pixel art before, and I’m really happy with the way that it turned out. If you’d like to see the original video, click here.
