How do you approach your animation?
 

Do you approach like your telling a story?
Making a commercial for your team or FIRST?
Do you style it like the opening credits of a television show?
Just wing it?

Watch the DVD they sent you with the winners from last year.
That should help.
The distinct impression I got was that they're looking for commercials for FIRST, so that's the concept we're working with.

i agree they go for a "commercial format". they look for compelling creatvity and all the pretty stuff...no matter what award you're going for...all of those play a part so consider that when starting out.


*jeremy

basically we thought of an idea in the summer, scrapped that idea in the fall and made a new idea before the start of the kickoff that we all thought was sweet. so it's mostly sporatic

We try to decide on an aspect of FIRST- as the rules request- and then try to find a way to illustrate that idea. I like the commercial approach because we need to keep it short. We've had trouble in the past because we try to cram too much into 30 sec and the judges probably miss half of it because they need to look at another 300 animations after ours.

Keep it simple but be creative

Look at commercials and videos that you like and try to identify what you like about them and what separates them from the rest. Look at last years DVD (as someone suggested already) then kick butt!

I'm not sure which DVD you are talking about:confused:

A DVD came with the Animation Software Package. It had all the entries of animation from last year. (It cam this year- you should have gotten it with the software)

Start without a computer at all! Look at FIRST in general, see an aspect (Teamwork, mentoring, etc.) and just start brainstorming. The first thing you wanna do is create a storyboard. My recommendation: Dont start using 3ds max until the storyboard is done! If you start with max, you'll get carried away with graphics, loose sight of the objective, and end up with FX out the wahzoo and no supporting ideas whatsoever. This happened to team 108 last year, and I vow not to let it happen again!