On the subject of animation over the summer...
GRT was going to do an animation training thing over the summer, and our community outreach people had the idea of turning it into a second animation competition. the idea was to spend 6 weeks during the summer making an animation as a "practice" FIRST build. The rules would probably be different (like letting you use whatever software/codec you wanted), but the intent would be similar: make a 30 second commercial for your team, mostly as training for next year. I'm not exactly sure how judging would go (possibly a bunch of people, selected from teams near us), but I think that it would be a fun thing to do and a good way to prepare for next year's competition.
So how many other animation people would be interested in doing something like that?
Send me email if you are interested, so that I can start trying to organize this
ekessler@gunnrobotics.org