Animation Ideals

[Soukup]

I think I can completely understand now what everyone is saying about animations being boring. Yes, alot do feature the robot and field, but just remember you can't expect everyone to be creative. Its hard for many teams to learn the program and then come up with cool ideas for their animation in time. Some of the previous posts are a little selfish. It seems that everyone wants to be entertained by every animation. Realize that everyone has to start somewhere and most of these attempts will be quite similar to each other. Part of this deals with the contest guidelines that make it quite easy to make an animation with just a field.

Be patient, because in about 5 years having a robot in an animation will be a rarity. I think this whole animation thing is about 2-3 years from being a MAIN part of FIRST, not just an alternative award. Until then, lets stop talking baout how bored we are with other peoples products and start talking about how creative our own are.

[SteveC116]

All I'm saying is that FIRST pushes students. It pushes teams to be original and creative for in so many ways and in so aspects! Subsystem design, website design, chairmans award, Inventor, visualization! ALL OF THESE PUSH CREATIVITY!

Of course it is hard. Of course teams may find it hard to come up for original ideas. But to just fall back on cliches while saying "well we can't come up with something great in the time given to us" is almost a cop out when so many other teams so such creativity in every aspect of their team.

The "I" in F.I.R.S.T. stands for INSPIRATION. So teams, BE INSPIRED! Be inspired by the creativity that only a High School student can show.

[Rysith]

well, I know that this year we are trying to stay away from the whole robot/field idea. Last year, we had only the robot (only briefly), and it worked very well (), so we are trying something that is similarly non-robot-oriented this year

[Ryan Dognaux]

I have no problems with teams using the field / robot in their animation, just as long as it's not the only thing that happens... because that's just not creative at all. Like this year, we will probably show the robot on the field for a few seconds doing some of its best things, but it's definately not going to be focused on that.

If you need ideas, maybe watching the entire kickoff again will help. I know it helped me...

[pras870]

I remember our rookie year, me and my tech teacher drew up a storyboard for our animation that I thought was really impressive/innovative. Basically it start off with the robot being constructed, you flipped a switch and it spun tire leaving a smoke trail off the school, followed it down a road and onto the highway, it burst through 2 swinging doors into the arena, hits a ramp into the field, throws some balls in the goals, and then you see it spin tire again, and on the field it left something like "Team 870, Coming To a Zone Zeal near you!".

That is an example of an animation that i'm sure everyone would like to see. Unfortunately we had to scrap this idea, since I was the only one doing the animation, and had to concentrate more on building the actual robot then animation. It was a good idea though