Well just to clear the air... (Forgive the long post- I could type much more here)
Paragraph 6.1 on page 17 of
THE AWARDS DOCUMENT states that the award is given for a submission using 3ds Max.
Paragraph 6.2 states that the award recognizes a 30 SEC Student ANIMATION- Not MOVIE or VIDEO. (Oh and notice the STUDENT part- some teams have trouble with this one too!)
The further description of the entry guidelines does state that you can use video. However if you don't have 30sec of animation then you technically are following the rules.
For those of you that think this to be a discrepancy in the rules- let me clarify. You can achieve both by incorporating live footage into the and other wise 3D Scene. or you can incorporate 3D into an otherwise Live Footage Scene.
One of the Honorable Mentions last year- Sunny Thumper I think (which I also believe is from the Gila Monsters on the West Coast, but don't hold me to that) Used a technique that he described in a post- in the post 2002 threads last year. He used live bg footage and used advanced 3DS techniques to map the footage and have the proper camera angles and perspectives. Other than the Instant Reality that is achieved- It is actually much harder to do this- especially if there are moving cameras.
There is nothing wrong about using Live footage- as long as it follows the rules.
That all said- I agree with everyones conclusion. I am an animation mentor and I work very hard to help the students achieve their final result. As you may have read in the second post above- We used a live actor (student on our team) and we set up a green screen shoot and recorded a chest up shot of him going through the monolog. then we composited him into a space suite as he floated above the earth (we were vying for a spacewalk from NASA but our teams budget didnt allow for it!). There was 30sec of animation because we never left the CG created environment. This is an example of how to follow the rules.
I believe our animation to be close to or some place within the top 10 of the ones I saw. Unfortunately I didnt have the winner anyplace near that. A couple of posts above me talked about the fact that because of the lack of winners they advanced the top 5 animations- Even with that there were only 43 teams (before the final week of competition. There is no excuse for the best teams to be over looked by professional judges. I can understand when there were over 200 submissions, but not 43.
This year the judges went down hill. I'm not trying to insult the team that won, it wasn't any wrong doing on your part. I don't know where the previous post gets off talking about collusion with autodesk. Thats just plain not right. But adding live action this way isn't anything new and wasn't especially creative- many animations have done it in the past that only difference is they didn't win. So content communication would really be the only high score that was possible for this type of animation.
All I know is the second it was over one of our team advisors who also teaches media communications in the HS turned to me and said "What was that?" He also doesn't mean to insult any one and would never make a comment like that if he was watching them all play and that was just in the mix. But he saw many of the animations and he teaches video and media communications in the school and when this was played as the winner- He was shocked- and I dint have to say a thing. Then without any prompting from me- because I was too pissed to even bring it up- every engineer and teach at some point or another asked me why that entry won. Unfortunately I have no answer.
Just to finish off a long post with a question- How did they make it to the Championships anyway. Some of you must have voted for them to some degree. So before this was an issue of Autodesk Judges, you must look at yourselves (at least those that were in the concerned conferences).
All and all I think there was a great job done by many many teams and the rookie entries that Ted showed on Thurs were great animations in general and not just good rookie animations.
Regardless of the results, be proud of what you all did and strive forward to step up and separate yourself from the pack.
Great Job to All!