[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Karthik

Here's what the game manual has to say:



So the official line is that you must submit a video to be considered, however the video is not part of the official judging process, but can work against you.

As for the discussion of video quality, it is very possible to make a professional looking video without professional expertise or equipment.

http://youtu.be/qFwz3FZqiuc

Like 341, this video was done completely in house by our students, edited on one of their Macs. The red background you can see is actually our bumper fabric. (My reaction was priceless when I discovered where our "missing" roll of red bumper fabric actually was...)

That being said, this video was truly a labour of love. We wanted to make a video that we'd be proud to show off to the FIRST community if we won the Chairman's Award. The amount of time that was put into this video rivaled the efforts put into Simbot Jordan. Despite the manual telling us the video wasn't being officially judged, we felt that to win the Chairman's Award on the world stage, we needed to have video befitting of that grand platform.

We did not play our video during the interview. However, it was a major part of our Chairman's Action Plan. The essay was for getting factual information out about our team's story. The presentation supplemented the essay's content, emphasizing the areas we felt deserved the most attention. The video was for showing the softer and more human side of our team; what it means to be a Simbot and the emotions we've felt about our journey. You're only allowed 1500 words, 5 minutes of presentation and 3 minutes of video, you need to maximize this time/space by minimizing duplication.

My advice to any team submitting for the Chairman's Award in the future? Start early, devise a strategic plan, brainstorm ideas, search for inspiration, begin production, iterate and improve repeatedly. (If this sounds suspiciously similar to the process for building a robot, it's because it's the same) Win or lose the award, a well done video is a piece of art that will tell your team's story forever. As you can tell from this post, I'm somewhat attached to our team's video...

Karthik,
this brings up some fond memories of recent years for us as well.
The amount of time our students put into the RCA rivaled that of our robot construction annually. From storyboarding to capturing just the right moment of a team's experiences, it was definitely an iterative process the entire year. Our lead person who was also the Allaire Medal recipient that year, literally gave up her life for 3 years in her quest for the CCA.

Even based on your post though, I still think the video counts for something. As I had mentioned several times the last couple of years, teams have to ask certain guiding essential question(s)........Is your video good enough to show on the grand stage and something FIRST would be proud to show the rest of the world?


Well maybe not, since ours was never showed.