Do you work together or in different locations. Even if its somone's home you need to have a central place to work and even then you need to share! (I'm trying to teach my 11month old twins that every day- No comparison here just a side note!)

The tutorials will give to a foundation. if you get confused then you need to have the person that knows what they're doing and get them to help everyone. The reason you all need to work together is to learn from each other. You trade techniques and ideas and motivation. Thats what TEAM is all about!

By the way we are in Week three- 4.5 weeks left!!

Not to put the pressure on or anything!

heh um yours, was ummmm, well me and the person who i taught doing it completely on our own for the first time, I would say that our animation was.......... simple. This years should be pretty cool though. One word for the 2nd half of our animation, holodeck!!!!!!

Hey it wasn't that bad :( especially for our 2nd year...

This year is our 3rd year on Animation, but we did lose the 2 main animation people last year... so I'm kinda heading it up this year :\ . The best advice I can give new teams is to keep it simple, but get your message across in a really good way. This year's animation should be about a certain aspect of FIRST, so our animation will only have things in it related to our aspect. With only 2 (sometimes 3) people working on Animation this year, we have no choice but to keep it simple.

rules?
 

I am sorta confused by the animation rules this year..... in fact, I tried to search for the animation rules on usfirst.org and couldn't find any, the site only gave me a guideline on how to decide a animation storyline.... Can anyone tell me where the rules are?

On the first site go to the robotics link and then the documents and updates link. There you need to look for the AWARDS.PDF , I'm pretty sure the Autodesk Visualization Award (which is what it is officially called) starts on page 17 of that PDF.

Got a question. anyone knows please reply ASAP!!! Will the time showing the text be counted as part of the 30 seconds animation. and I don't mean the cast in the end but the text in the middle of the animation (e.g. indicatng the time-3 minutes later, 1 year later, etc)

Yes it WILL count as part of 30 seconds. By the rules, the timing starts once animation leaves the opening still, and stops at the beginning of 5 second black screen. You don't want to have any more than 30 seconds/900 frames in between those, since violation of that might lead to a DQ.

Can anyone help with scrolling subtitles? We've finished the animation, but we're having trouble in Adobe Premiere. If anyone could help us, we have to finish this tonight...Thanks!:ahh:

If you are having problems with Premiere, why not just use 3ds max? just draw a credits list in Photoshop - map it on a plane, and animate the plane moving upwards in max. Render it and you'll have decent scrolling credits.

The 3DS method should work just fine.

But another way is to just have a series of still frames that disolve from one to another.

As far as premiere is concerned, have you looked in the help files or online so see if there are tutorials or support to help you do the scrolling text? I haven't used premiere in years and cant help you with out sitting infront of it. In an Avid, I would use the Title tool to type out my Credits, then I would place them over my background footage (or black) and the keyframe the first and last position, then viola Scrolling text. See if there's a simpleway to keyframe your elements (you may need to look in the DVE (digital video effects) effects pallet if the effects are catagorized that way. Good luck.