Redirect this if there's a better place, but I heard FL-Nordin won first place for GTL's Intermediate section with his Risk of Rain tribute animation. He won $400 but when I went to watch it I recognized some of his money shots. The best parts of his animation weren't even his own animation. I discussed it with Hyun and some other people and this is pretty upsetting that he won first place over other animations and a cash prize using other peoples work without even crediting it.

Here are the comparisons:

My stickpage intro rip

Attack on Titan Levi vs Female titan rip

Pretty disappointed this was allowed to slide.

I don't understand why capable artists feel the need to trace. This is the same as when Danmark was found out. People are going to try to justify it but at the end of the day it's incredibly dishonest either way. Like I said on IRC, I think it's unreasonable to think Stone or CJ knew about this and let it slide, but now that it's being brought up something should be done about it even if it's just a formal apology. That's my opinion.

lmao he made the stickpage intro look better :^)

but on a serious note if he did roto thats not cool

I don't think I can say much other than I'm QUITE dissapointed on him...

I put the gifs in spoilers cos they're moderately huge and take a bitch to load.

I'd feel much differently if these were mentioned in the credits as homages...

to be honest the stickpage/fluidanims thing seemed more like a tribute in my opinion.

The Titan thing however, well, I'll keep that comment to myself.

Edit;
I don't really have any immediate feelings about the titan thing.
From my perspective, it's not something that was done cheaply, just to get the winning blow in a competition.
Granted that this definitely IS NOT something I would do or encourage others to do, I'm left with some very neutral emotions.

Throwing emotions aside and going by my logic;
If we let this slide, other animators are going to start doing this because it's been made 'okay' to do by the majority.
And even if they get caught they can copy FL-Nordin's excuse.
-
Monkey see monkey do, people who are willing to copy for the sake copying will copy things ALL the way.

The AoT scene should be edited by FL-Nordin himself;
The turning around punch and the spinning blade can be kept as a homage, sure,
but when things get to be nearly spot on, THAT needs to be changed.
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My solution would to be to have him recreate the shots differently.
Could be the same movements and just a different angle by the camera.
As long as it doesn't come as close as it is currently in it's retrospect.
-
It wouldn't be out of line to have the judges to re-judge the animation after.
But we can't have them give a biased vote based on what would be these now past events.

Credits given where Credit is due;
Even with the change of that shot, as long as something is paying homage to something else,
as an independent producer it's incredibly important that you put these things in the credits.
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Not everyone is going to know what it's giving homage to, and the people who do can really mess things up for you.
Especially if you homage things regularly without credit.



And for sifters who're only checking the first page or two because of the thread title,
here's a key part of the discussion that I want you to read;
http://forums.stickpage.com/showthread.php?86415-FL-Nordin-Risk-of-Rain-ROTOSCOPE/page5#48


The professional world isn't relatively cruel, but people can be REALLY nasty.
It might not seem like it, but this community is actually looking out for you as a whole when we tell you that this isn't right, or that this is a grey area.

well it is as rhook says: if it was a tribute, then he should've made mention or asked about its legality. But here he just blatantly intended it. When Danick got caught, he fessed up quickly and made some stupid excuse about how everyone does it in small doses anyway and that those were his only traces. But then we saw more and at that point the conclusion was that he had only apologized to the mistakes that WE caught.

so its just the same here. Who knows, maybe Nordin traced alot more stuff

Not to throw this too off-topic, but what exactly was the Danmark situation? Just wondering about the history of this and all.

Same thing as right now, cept the one who found out was majorly Micool (the explosions expert). teh thread's somewhere up there in the Official Anims section

I dont remember the details but I think he also actually worked in professional animation and might've mentioned that his boss also does it so he has no qualms doing it

Quote from Raptor

Not to throw this too off-topic, but what exactly was the Danmark situation? Just wondering about the history of this and all.

- DanmarK gets his tribute, DKMagician, uploaded on the front page of SP.

- DanmarK gets busted for rotoscoping a certain scene and explosions of his Miccool tribute by Miccool himself, which is pretty ironic. I think Jombo helped as well.

- DanmarK apologizes for rotoscoping and is allowed to remake parts of the animation he rotoscoped and give credit to the animator whose work he had rotoscoped in the credits. DanmarK does so, and the revised edition of DKMagician takes the original's spot on SP's front page.

- DanmarK gets caught a second time for new things that were uncovered (I believe by Miccool, but I'm not too sure, I think it could've been Jombo) within his animation that had been suspected of being rotoscoped.

- DanmarK says something along the lines of "aw man, im so busted >.<" and vanishes from the forum. He didn't fix his mistakes this time.

FL-Nordin had been essentially caught for the same reason DanmarK was caught. FL-Nordin/Fearless was one person I hadn't really expected to do such a thing, since he's always done quality work in my eyes ever since he had his END WAR animation uploaded on FA's YouTube channel.

This makes me quite sad, I don't even have a problem with rotoscoping as long as its not the entire animation, but the fact that it was done in a competition with money as a prize is sickening.

Ahahaha oh man what the hell.

I sure hope people stop sucking this guy's cock now.

I can't remember the last time I diagnosed stiffness in a flash animation, but his torsos are rife with it.

Anyway yeah, I'm with RawGreen. The intro thing looks like it's just a tribute. Assuming these things were posted on StickPage, everyone is going to recognise that. If I'd decided to put a bit like that into one of my animations I don't think I'd have explicitly said "this bit is based on the SP intro" because I'd assume everybody already knew. It's not like he traced it either - even the bit with the hands has clearly been done from scratch. It's his own animation based on the SP Intro's choreography. Some people probably got a laugh out of it.

Again like RawGreen, I have nothing to say about the other one.

Quote from Tsang

FL-Nordin had been essentially caught for the same reason DanmarK was caught. FL-Nordin/Fearless was one person I hadn't really expected to do such a thing, since he's always done quality work in my eyes ever since he had his END WAR animation uploaded on FA's YouTube channel.

Woah woah woah, what? Fearless = FL-Nordin? Okay, now that IS shocking. The style's don't look similar at all to his past animations like End War. Now I'm really disappointed since I really looked up to Fearless back in the early FA days.

Quote from Jomm

Pretty disappointed this was allowed to slide.

Like Zed said, I'm sure the intro was just a tribute and whoever was doing the judging just let it slide. I'm not sure if it's exact rotoscoping though; if it is, then I'm surprised this wasn't double-checked.

As for the AoT part, that really depends if people actually watched that episode. I know I sure didn't, so I'm not really sure how people expected this to be found out easily. Unless there's an easy way to reverse-search an animation and look at similarities, but I'm not entirely sure about that.