[opnickc]

We had 5 members on our animation team. No extras for sound or editing, just 5. 2 experienced, 3 new. And a somewhat inexperienced mentor. In fact, we often had to steal a mentor from engineering who used to do animation to help us. Oh, and the hardest animation idea we've ever concieved, an incosistant method of distributing the workload, and only 5 weeks to do it (school was closed the 6th week, it needed to be finished on Friday the 13th). with all of the management issues, it may be better to have a one person animation team. but I believe having a larger team serves a greater purpose. Last year, we also had five members. This year, one went to the chairman's group and one to the engineering (one quit). This year, three of our new animators are planning on moving to engineering. Although it's bad for our animation team to lose so many members to other parts of the team, it's good for the cause of FIRST. I never would've wanted to go into engineering before I joined FIRST, and I probably wouldn't have joined if it wasn't for animation. What this does is attract a larger audience to the FIRST community, as well as teach a quickly growing form of communicating theoretical ideas and possibilities, as well as displaying events in history.

Back on topic:
I was the most experienced member of our group. I had been working on character studio all summer so that we could put people in our animation. In retrospect, I believe it consumed far more time than it was worth. One of the big "sellers" (so to speak) of our animation was going to be a roaring crowd at a FIRST event in the beggining of the animation. One member spent the entire time animating people cheering, clapping, and jumping up and down as if in a crowed. To make a long story short, we couldn't get it to render at the last minute and ended up just using a picture of a crowd. Once again, in retrospect he could've been working on cameras and lighting, which were both very last minute in our animation. Oh well, hind sight is always 20-20.