Arts
Sweat, Tears and Animation How we became friends at 2 a.m. Story and Photos by Marissa Espiritu A unique community exists within Long Beach State’s animation department, one where everyone is just a bit too crazy and entirely too comfortable with each other. We’ve seen each other at our worst, dressed in pajamas, unshowered, unrested, and making coffee to salvage what few brain cells are left at 4 a.m. It’s a personal bond, one we experience on a near global level after the 24-Hour Animation Competition. Starting in 2002 at Laguna College, CSULB art department head, Aubry Mintz, dared his students to stay after class to finish their projects, simulating the environment of an animation studio. Starting as a late night endeavor, the lock-in soon dwindled to five students enjoying the sunrise in celebration. As he tells it, “They got more done in that time, in that 24-hour period, than they had in the whole semester.” Inspired by this madness, Mintz led the challenge every year after that initial midnight marathon. In 2004 Mintz gave his first prompt, The Chicken or the Egg. The next year there were so many students that he had to put them in teams. He realized the events popularity when the contest made CSULB a permanent home in 2007. In 2010, the contest opened up to other schools statewide, and then nationwide. Four years later, 24Hour Animation went international. Today, 65 schools (two of which were high schools) from
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9 different countries offer up 1,455 students eager to spend their night animating, a record breaking high of participants.
“This contest was created to help people understand the rigors of the animation industry...” The premise is simple: Get yourself a small team of wonderfully insane people. Wait for Mintz to announce the prompt and use the next 24-hours to create a 30-second animation. On Friday, October 4, 11 teams from CSULB huddled behind Mintz as he got on the live stream. The room was filled with all different majors: animation, illustration, film, computer science and even dance. This was my third and final year competing in this tradition and I wanted to take my time and really find out what makes my fellow students tick. Stepping through a jungle of laptop chargers and tablet cords, I found myself occasionally dodging sleeping bags hidden in corners and under tables. The food was the mostly unsustainable, trash kind of snacks but enough to feed a small village.
