the final team 217 - the ThunderChickens animation
 

we were quite limited by lack of students, computers, and time, but we did quite well in my opinion. take a look at our animation at the link below, and while you stop by pick up some wallpapers from your favorite team. us. obviously. and browse the pictures of the last thing your robot will ever see before being crushed under an avalanche of bins. :)
http://www.thunderchickens.org/?page=clucky.php

Was use of the Batman theme legal? As with the 'Super chicken' theme during credits?

I know a few teams have been DQ'd for copyrighted music.

Interesting idea for the animation, rather cleanly done also. Nice job chickens

theme songs
 

wha ha ha. we didnt ACTUALY USE the batman theme. it sounds a LOT like it! but its not the batman theme in its entirety!

...

well yea we'll probably get DQed but we just did this for fun really.

Very Cool
 

This is a very cool animation. SuperChicken!!

:D

what exactly does that have to do with first or "technology to save the future"?

Way cool!
 

I liked it so much I listened to it several times. I'm still laughing!

Darn you quicktime!!

The first part is funny and well done, but i must agree with TheFork that I don't see any meaning or message that you are trying to communicate...

meaning
 

tee hee. yea there is no meaning. like i said before it was just for fun, we really didnt start it with the attitude that we were gonna win anything, and im impressed that we made it this far.
we actually made up that attempt at a meaning on the last day. we just thought it would be kinda fun to spoof batman.
thanks for the compliments though!

Hilarious. COuld you post a version that hasnt been compressed to smithereens? I could barely see around the egg-sized pixels. If need be, i could prolly provide the space for a bigger version...

Side note

hmmm.... I guess I can't quote your message there about the clocks. I like that, that is the funniest thing!

I was one of the judges at the st. louis regoinal. I gave you guys about a 75/100 only because it had nothing to do with first. but i must say, pretty funny and un-expected. Even though our anim got dq'ued because of faulty cd's, u guys lightened the mood. good job, just next time make it slightly more first oriented.

Vague meaning, but it's there
 

I disagree about our animation not having any meaning.

Originally, the evil robot knocking down buildings was supposed to break them into neatly stackable containers. Then our robot was supposed to stack the knocked over buildings back up. Due to time restraints, lack of experience, and long rendering times we had to go with what we had.

Our statement "Technology to Save the World" is very simplistic and doesn't require much interpretation. It's just like cartoons where the heroes save the day from some evil monster destroying the town. It would have been more obvious if we had our robot stack the buildings back up, but the only role our robot played was as a transport for Clucky. :rolleyes:

That scene does have something to say about our robot though. It's extremely fast going up the hill to knock down the stacks, and a hill is shown in the animation with our robot racing toward the buildings. Our autonomous mode time from activation to contact with the bins averages under 4 seconds easily.

If you didn't notice, our sponsors' logos were in the distress spotlights before they merged into our ThunderChickens logo. The meaning is vaguely there, although I think we could have done a better job making it clearer or more relevant. Overall we put too much emphasis on humor rather than meaning. The problems I had with our animation were we tried to squeeze too much into a short amount of time, some scenes lasted longer than they should have, other scenes weren't long enough, bad camera angles in some scenes, some scenes were never modeled/animated but were vital to the animation, and the overall cheesiness of the whole theme.

To sum it up for those who didn't catch it, our animation's intended meaning was our technology can save the world with the speed of our drive train to respond to distress signals instantly and our stacking ability to restore a demolished city.

:( well i liked it. we just hit some major time restraints and ended up with little cooperation at all from the team except you and me... so yea we could have refined it a bit more but... nobody was really making an effort to and i was working just trying to get the bare minimum out, which was hard enough. i had to rerender the entire thing the day before we shipped.

Yeah i gave you guys really high at northwestern except had to take off for the message, or lack there of.
The cell shading was really cool how did you do that?
we were really cramped on people too, we had like 15 but noone knew how to do anything and i ended up dooing like 90% of ours and since i'm a freshman i had never used it before in my life.
(in case you saw it ours was the really bad pinball machine)