Introducing Feedback Sessions

Time to offer something new and exciting on the Blender Cloud! For the first time, we are introducing: Animation Feedback Sessions. Do you have an animated video that you would like to get some feedback on? Share it with us, we are going to review it and publish it here on the cloud! For this session, the focus will be exclusively on (character) animation.

What does animation feedback look like?

Check out this video to get an idea about how a feedback session video will look like.

How do I get my animation reviewed?

Upload the video to Youtube or Vimeo and post the link or the embed code as a comment. Once voting is done we'll grab the highest rated video from there.

About feedback

Never take feedback personally, you are not your work. If you're a thin-skinned person that's sensitive to feedback then you're gonna have to grow up. Positivity for positivity's sake and negativity for negativity's sake are equally harmful in the long run.

• Idea behind feedback is trying to make the work better. You and the person giving feedback should be on the same team. You're both striving for the same goal.
• Choose who you get feedback from. Not all feedback is equally helpful. All notes should be taken with a grain of salt. You might need to weigh in who it's coming from regarding their experience on the subject.
• Sometimes notes are more helpful because they spotted a problem instead of the specific solution they suggested.
• You can get feedback from different people regarding the same work and get totally different notes. But when some of these notes address a specific problem, it's a good sign there's something there that needs to be worked on.
• Feedback is always going to be a mixture of subjective and objective notes. More professional feedback tends to be more objective but it's rarely 100%.
• Some notes may be very broad and others very specific. There's a chance they will seem to conflict but that's okay. It gives you the option to think about them and choose which note is more important or if perhaps there's a totally different solution that addresses both notes. There's usually no "one perfect solution", you've gotta make your own decisions based on the feedback.
• Feedback can only be given on what's there. Anything we can't see should not be a factor. It doesn't matter if this is the first time you animate a llama or that your software crashed just before the deadline. Your work needs to be judged on its own merits without any excuses.

Learning to give and receive honest feedback will make you a better artist.

Submission guidelines

• Length: about 10 seconds (12 seconds max). Feedback should be less broad and more animation specific on a shot-to-shot basis.
• Framerate: 24fps, 25fps or 30fps. We recommend 24fps, especially for animation training.
• Resolution: HD (1920x1080) is preferred but any traditional size is fine.
• Don't include any extra information into the video itself, like your name or contact information. No intros or outros, keep it simple.

We highly recommend not having any camera movement unless you feel it's really needed for the shot.

Deadline

The highest rated submission at the end of 24th of August (two weeks from the original posting of this article) will be reviewed. It may take a few days until the review video is posted on the cloud. Looking forward to seeing your work!