A solution for Animation Judging for 2005

[TKatsAniMentor]

Hello All,

I am one of the sponsors for the TechnoKats (45). We, myself and the other sponsors, have to say that the judging and overall enthusiam for the animation competition is at an all time low. Below are some comments and suggestions that we have discussed about the competition.

Regional judging still has problems. Not every regional has the same amount of teams attending; Therefore, teams at the least attended regionals have a much better chance of winning the award. After checking the release from Autodesk, we noticed that the NYC Regional has only 3 animations to be judged, while the Great Lakes Regional had 27 entries. Also, varying judging conditions and locations have also been a problem. Until these discrepancies are addressed, regional judging will not be "fair."

Another thing that needs to be addressed is the support and involvement of Autodesk with the animation competition. Autodesk does supply software to all the teams to create an animation. Does anyone use this software? We use AutoCad, 3DS Max, Adobe Premiere, Adobe PhotoShop, Macromedia Flash, Sound Forge, and Acid to do our animations. Only 1 piece of our software list is provided. I have heard a nasty rumor that Autodesk is going to force us to only use what is provided or the entry may be DQ'ed.

2002 and before Autodesk had a group of industry professionals that graded animations on Technical Execution, Content, and Creativity. These areas had their own awards as well as the overall and rookie awards. In 2003, Autodesk decided it would be best to eliminate the other honorable awards and give only the overall and rookie. I have to say being the Technical Excellence Honorable Mention Award winners in 2002 that we were upset about the change. With the judging leaving the hands of professionals and it being thrown at the students, all the current problems arose. First, the animation creation time was reduced by 1 month to coincide with the robot ship date. This caused students to choose either to work on the robot or the animation (in most cases) and forced the animators to lose more sleep due to the shortened deadline. Second, judging at last year's competitions was a total joke. Lastly, the entry that won the whole thing did not even win a regional competition and was mostly video, not animation.

Now that most of the problems are now addressed, let's talk solutions.

1. Autodesk needs to bring back the panel of professionals for judging. This meant that the judging was consistent because everyone saw every animation.
2. The animation competition needs to not be at the same time as the robot build. This gives the students an opportunity to work diligently on both.
3. We need a judging rubric. How are we supposed to know what it is that we are being judged on besides general categories?
4. We need a clear objective to achieve with the animation. This will give the animators a goal to shoot for (just like the game). This should not limit creativity.
5. Regional judging should be more organized if it is to continue. Maybe there could be a panel of team volunteers (students and mentors) to judge at regional competitions.
6. We need feedback. The honorable mention awards at least told the 3 teams recognized that they were close to what the judges were looking for.

Anything else you would like to add to the solutions list is welcome. Please no more gripes. There has been plenty of threads of those already. This was created to try to brainstorm solutions to fix the current problems.

Thanks for reading this.