[Joshua May]

Originally Posted by Soukup

All Animators would know what I am tlaking about....

IN my junior year (3 years ago) we had worked real hard to get our animation done. Thats when they still gave you 10 weeks to get it done. SO the robot had already been shipped and we were working at a team members house nearly every day for 4 weeks. There were 6 of us, and most of us had just learned to use this program for any benefit. Basically after about 1 week of hell and chris pulling an overnighter we were finally done. I got it to the shipping store 25 seconds before the FEDEX guy showed up. ANyways, we did a really product that would have easily been top 25, but it got disqualified. NO real reason, (well they gave us a bunch of reasons but none of them had anything to do with our animation) stuff like no title screen, no credits, no team name, no team number... it was the most puzzling email in the world. We all read this thing and felt our hearts sink to the floor. We could have understood if it had something to do with our animation, but it was like having 10 weeks of your life thrown away. Ive only cried three times in FIRST, and that was one time.

Well next year, we turned our anger and frustration into motivation. We used everything we had and won 3 regional animation awards. And when our name was annouced at GREAT LAKES that would have been the second time I cried.

Moral of the story.... crying in FIRST IS OKAY....

I know exactly how you feel. I was the team's sole animator for 2003, our rookie year nonetheless, and I worked the entire 6 week son getting that animation perfect, I swear I actually got maybe 1 hour of sleep in the last week. However, at the end of the 6 weeks, we had to give back the computer, so I gave a CD with all of the files to another guy who would render it and then we sent it off to FIRST. Well, he rendered it in the wrong format of all things, and we didn't get judged for it. And, the wrong file was sent to FIRST anyways, so if you look on the DVD, it's just really weird.

I got over it though,I was able to fix the animation before our venue at the local fair, and got some really good comments from it.