Main Competitions [table="width: 600, class: grid"]
No.	Date	Theme
1.	Friday, July 1st, 2016	Video Game Parody (OVER)
2.	Saturday, October 1st, 2016	Old And New (OVER)
3.	Sunday, January 1st, 2017	Discovery Gone Wrong (OVER)
4.	Saturday, April 1st, 2017	For Glory: eSports
5.	Saturday, July 1st, 2017	To Be Announced
6.	Sunday, October 1st, 2017	To Be Announced

Beginner Competitions

No.	Date	Theme
1.	Friday, July 15th, 2016	Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight (OVER)
2.	Monday, December 12th, 2016	Survival (OVER)
3.	Monday, May 1st, 2017	Unconventional Weapons
4.	Tuesday, August 1st, 2017	To Be Announced
5.	Wednesday, November 1st, 2017	To Be Announced

[/table]Please see the announcement thread for more details.

hmmm....interesting...

I'm going to start announcing themes in this thread starting with the next beginners competition theme: Survival. This time we're going simple and letting you come up with the details as long as your animation relates to survival in some way. We will have more details when the competition starts on the 15th.

Wait so the beginners competition are only 2? That doesn't seem fair considering how poor the first one ended up

Quote from darkhitman

Wait so the beginners competition are only 2? That doesn't seem fair considering how poor the first one ended up

I don't think it's really about fairness. It's about spending the site's money wisely. The first one ended poorly and that's probably WHY they're only having 2. The prizes ended up going to only a small amount of animations that all probably weren't worth the money they won, which is what many of us feared during the idea of beginner's competitions in general (or at least I did). Judging how things went, it's actually no surprise they're only doing 2 competitions. The whole point of these is to give animators an incentive to make a quality animation for the site, thus making the site money as well, so it's a win-win for both the entrant and the site. However, the beginners' entries probably just weren't as good, thus didn't make enough money to make up for the cost of hosting the competition, thus it's a huge win for the entrants, as they got much more money than their skills would earn otherwise, but a loss for the site. As nice as it is to give beginners a chance in these competitions, the site just doesn't make enough money from beginner's competitions to do them.

The fall competition was skipped so we could tweak some things and start it 2 weeks before the main competitions instead of 2 weeks after. There will still be concurrent competitions. The schedule for the beginner's is up in the air at the moment and depends on how well this one does.

Looks like the fourth SPAC is going to be an april fools lmao

Hey everyone, I've just slotted in the next line up of competitions to take us to the end of 2017, as well as announced the next beginners theme: Unconventional Weapons! I don't think staggering the competitions to 2 weeks apart was working the way I hoped, it was a bit overwhelming as I didn't expect to have as little time on my hands as I did. So I've moved the beginners competition to have a 1-month delay for everyone's sake, so that it goes way more smoothly and with more frequent updates. From then on we'll try to keep them the same 2 and a half-ish month intervals with 2 weeks of judging. It'll be interesting to break up the seasons a bit more that way too, perhaps we could do a more explicit seasonal theme like horror for Halloween. Actually that's not a bad idea, Jeff.

Awesome Jeff! We got another 2 competitions coming on O:>!