We don’t usually participate in contests, but when we first heard about the MyToons Bumper Blastoff Competition, we decided to at least check it out. At first, we had no idea what a ‘commercial bumper’ even was, but after reading about it on the MyToons website, we figured that we could actually pull that off. Producing 30 seconds of animation definitely beats producing 30 minutes.

Congratulations to all of the winners of the MyToons bumper contest! The finalists were announced on March 6th, 2008 and the winners on March 12, 2008. Unfortunately our bumpers didn’t make the cut, but that’s perfectly fine! We’ve gained a lot (in experience, inspiration, motivation, and even friends) just from simply entering the contest!

Another big thanks to our sister and parents for helping us develop the bumpers, and thanks to everyone in the MyToons community for their massive amounts of support and kind words on our entries. You guys and gals are amazing!

Yes way! Okay so this may sound insane, but we decided to attempt creating a second bumper with the remaining days left until the deadline. That left us with only two days to create the bumper from start to finish.

Since we had already submitted ‘Everything Animated’, this second bumper wasn’t so much about trying to come up with a super creative idea. In fact, the idea came to us prior to even deciding to go for it. We’ve been receiving massive amounts of positive feedback on our ‘Everything Animated’ submission, and the sheer love and support from the incredibly talented people in the MyToons community has been overwhelming! That’s what inspired this second bumper.

The idea behind this one is based off of the actual community of MyToons. Everyone is incredibly nice and there is so much talent, it’s a massive inspiration just being there! Once we were able to check out other people’s submissions to the bumper contest, it was not only inspiring to see, but fascinating how diverse the art and animations styles were. How cool would it be if there was a project with all of these diverse art and animation styles, combined into a single scene? That’s what this bumper (that we’re calling ‘Community’) is all about.

With the length of time that we had to finish this, we unfortunately couldn’t reach out to other artists and animators to have them contribute, so we made it a little in-house experiment. Normally we would conform our artwork to fit a single style, but in this project we wanted everyone’s artwork raw and specific to their own style.

As soon as we had the concept down in our minds, we got started working on it immediately. We knew that it was a VERY long shot of us getting this done in time, but we took the chance anyway. We started around 1:00 pm (PST) on February 26th, 2008 and ended up finishing (and submitting) it at exactly 8:02 am (PST) on February 28th, 2008. The competition deadline was at 11:59am (CST), which was like 8:59 am for us. So in other words, we managed to finish and submit it with only 57 minutes to spare.

This one runs about 21 seconds, and it has a wide variety of characters from cartoons that we currently have in the works, combined with the 60+ random character designs that we came up with when we first started. We’ll be sure to tell you more about the development process in the future.

Our MyToons bumper is complete and submitted with only a few days to spare… whew! And it weighed in at exactly… 29 seconds… WHEW! So far it has gotten some great reviews.

You can check it out right here:

In order to speed up production time, we needed more help. So we enlisted the creative minds of not only our sister (who created all of the sparkly special effects that you’ll see in the bumper), but our parents as well. We’ve definitely gotten our creative genes from our parents (who were both artists growing up), so we can’t thank them enough for all of the support that they have given us. Even going out of their way to put pencil to paper and help design the toys found in the room. Our mom even pulled our her old musical talents by helping us produce the official music!

We can truly say that without our sister and parents pitching in their time and efforts, we most certainly would not have made the deadline. A million thanks to them and thanks to everyone who has commented on our submission at MyToons! You flatter us!

The new episode of 2nd Avenue is coming along nicely! While production continues to move forward, the episodes is unfortunately still a long ways from completion. So, in the meantime we decided share a few images from the latest episode, as well as introduce two new character who will be making their debut!