I mentioned this in another thread, and this seems somewhat similar...
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 not during fall (when school has started and all those other annoying things), but it seems like it should be fairly easy to let people from wherever participate (CDs are easy to mail). Obviously some details would have to be worked out, but I'm just testing the waters too. If you are interested, send mail to
Eaglek@rocketmail.com