Animation Winners at Nats

[EugeneMarinelli]

I'm also upset with the results of the visualization competition. (By the way, I started writing this before the last few posts, so I'm probably repeating some stuff) I do realize that it is called the "visualization" award and not just the "animation" award, but I think it's not very fair to the animators that an entry comprised almost entirely of video clips, no matter how good it is in content and creativity, should win a national award that is widely assumed to be (based on past winners national winners and autodesk's sponsorship of the award) about 3d animation.

I'm not saying that team 967's entry is undeserving of recognition for its entry; it had great content communication and creativity. It was very well done, and the team did nothing wrong by submitting it. The problem, as I see it, is that the "technical execution" part of autodesk's judging system is corrupt. It's extremely unreasonable to compare student-made computer animation to live video, especially when technical execution is 20% of the grade. Personally, I don't think an entry that only uses live footage deserves much credit for technical execution. Recording something on a camcorder is a bit less technically demanding than producing an entire scene in 3ds max. Because of this, I think they should have a separate competition for video only.

If my animation team and I had known that the judges had a preference for video, we would have gotten the media crew to make something. Instead, in our ignorant suppositions, we spent countless hours planning the animation, learning 3ds max, and eventually applying advanced techniques in mapping, materials, modeling, animating, rendering, lighting, camera-ing, etc. to create our animation. Before the deadline, I remember spending a week of 15-hour days on nothing but perfecting and finalizing the animation, not even stopping to eat lunch or dinner. This was all during a huge snowstorm that dropped more than 2 feet of snow and almost completely blocked the roads to my school; I was actually considering spending the night in the computer room. All of this was even after my 4-animator team spent 3 to 4 weeks working on the animation at school and at home.
Because of autodesk's decision, it almost feels like I wasted my time. I might as well have taped a few of my team's meetings, set aside a couple of nice days to string some clips together, and taken a half an hour to render 2 or 3 simple images of the engineer-made robot. Animation takes more time, effort, and skill than clipping live footage, and I think it also deserves more recognition.

I know that I'm not giving team 967 a whole lot of credit for their technical work; it probably took a more significant amount of time than I'm suggesting. Again, it was very well done, and it does deserve recognition. However, I think that it's extremely discouraging to the vast majority of animators to see an entry that required almost no expertise in 3D animation winning the national prize.

Autodesk suggested that animation was the best way to go in their directions in the manual. They continually refer to entries as "animations" and only say one short phrase suggesting that live video is even acceptable. Even if they do say that live video can be used, it seems to indicate that having students use autodesk products is their main purpose for even having the competition.
The information about the award in the manual specifically says things like:
"Content communication - Distinction in the use of animation to illustrate and communicate a specific aspect of what FIRST means to your team"
"Compelling Creativity - Distinction in the use of animation to generate excitement about your team’s experience with FIRST."
"The challenge is to demonstrate how skillfully you use specific Autodesk products."

Finally, I remind you that team 967's entry was very well done, and I have nothing against it. The real problem is with autodesk and their inconsistencies between what they say and how they judge.