This is perhaps the last time I’ll be posting to CD from 2976 - I’ll be graduating from high school in a few days, ending my time with team 2976. I’ve been with the team for all 4 years of my high school career and led the Media department as the Director of Media for 3 of those years, so needless to say this is quite a sad day for me. That being said, the media department is in good hands moving forward and they’ll be producing the same excellent content that you expect from our team. This post is similar to our Full Media Set post from last year, where I’ll highlight the path that our media department took this year and share some fun stories about the development of our brand. Also, we’ll be sharing a Reveal 2023 Whitepaper, which covers quite literally everything about the event production, from start to finish. Scroll to the Reveal 2023 section for more information.
The Media Team Gets a Brand??
We were feeling a little bored one weekend so we decided to give our media team a real brand. You’ve already seen elements in our 2023 event recaps, but here’s the official rundown:
We decided on a mission statement “Make Something Incredible” both as a reminder to ourselves and our followers that as creatives, we don’t exist to please management - we exist as artists with a vision to create spectacles for our audiences. We felt that the Luminous Iridescence gradient embodies that idea so we implemented it as our Media Department Gradient.
The Year 15 Alternate Brand
Highlighted in this post, we created an Alternate Brand Identity for the 2022-2023 season as it would be our 15th season in FRC. It built itself upon key pillars like “forward-thinking” and “boldness,” and serves as the basis of our 4.0 identity (which will be shared later this year). The Y15 identity is based on our Brand 3.1 Standard, with various refreshed elements that were developed to fit the new theme better. We actually liked some of these elements so much that they’ll be making a direct return in Brand 4.0.
The Alternate Brand served as the basis for our work this year. it guided our cinematography and production style, dominated our graphics development, and carved itself a fairly notorious legacy that will be hard to match in Year 20 (but don’t worry, we’re cooking some crazy stuff up. Y20 will not disappoint, I promise). Work for the identity began in April of 2022, just before the World Championship, and we grinded hard to get the Branding Standard ready and beta-tested by the start of the FRC season. We were able to wrap it up in November with the flag renders (which were actually supposed to be unveiled with the Robot Reveal 2023 Identity, but we loved them so much that we made a Y15 version to be released early), and dropped the entire brand to CD.
We also printed these fancy booklets to be displayed at competition:
…They were a hit and we are finding every possible excuse to print documents now. We’ll also have our leftover copies available as keeper units at Tidal Tumble, so be sure to pick one up if you want one for yourself! There will be no reruns of this booklet once they are gone.
For those of you who follow the production hour count: 200 hours is our best bet for the branding identity, but this was one of the projects that we didn’t really track this year.
Robot Reveal Event 2023
Our mantra for the Reveal 2023 event was “Bigger, Better, Bolder” and personally, I think we delivered. 4 of our PNW friends joined the Reveal Production Unit (or RPU) this year and presented their Charged Up competitors to the world on March 12th, 2023. Leading up to the event was months of meticulous collaboration, shotlisting, test renders, and preparation. In this time, we helped all of the teams film their reveal reels, and our media team edited together all of the videos to be displayed during the event. As a part of our 2023 Broadcast Overhaul, we introduced dual broadcast capability which allowed us to (finally) stream the reveal event to YouTube alongside the in-person event. You can find the VOD for that here:
I will be the first to admit that there were some technical issues with the Youtube side of things, and the team is working to resolve those for 2024 so that the online viewers will have just as great of an experience as our in-person audience did this year.
Production Hours: Across the entire RPU, we put in approximately 1000 production hours to make Reveal 2023 happen.
Reveal 2023 Technical Whitepaper
Curious about how we pulled off the event? Look no further than the 48-page whitepaper that we put together for Reveal 2023! This is an unprecedented resource - the Live Production industry is one that typically doesn’t release much documentation. We found this to be incredibly frustrating as we were researching stage tech options for our event. To help teams navigate this incredibly complex craft area, we’ve consolidated as much information as possible into the whitepaper, which we hope will serve as a good resource for teams looking to put together their own events or level up their Robot Reveal reels. This document goes over everything about production, from creative inspiration to post-production, so give it a good read if you’re interested!
We’ll have hard copies available to borrow at select offseason events in 2023 and the web version has been uploaded here.
Direct Download:
Robot Reveal 2023 Whitepaper.pdf (10.6 MB)
Production Hours: I’m ngl, the whitepaper took me a solid 50 hours to write since I was mostly doing it alone.
2976 Robot Reveal Reel 2023
While technically part of the production of the Reveal 2023 event, our team’s own reveal reel is something we want to highlight since we think we’ve leveled up the production quality from last year, which in hindsight is a pretty scuffed reveal video. Unlike last year, we had a complete robot this time, except it underwent some pretty large visual changes between different days of production. This resulted in the final video basically showing the bot in 2 or 3 different iterations. While the changes weren’t exactly groundbreaking, it was pretty annoying to have to use footage with different bots and we are definitely going to try to find ways to avoid this problem next year.
As usual, our inspirations involved the 2018-2020 team 610 reveals as well as the 118-style game footage cinematography. Ultimately, our reveal production is largely hindered by our team’s build schedule (or more like build schedule delays, in true FRC fashion) which doesn’t allow for much media time.
Glacier Peak Event Recap
So as we know now, 2976 did not make worlds this year. In fact, we didn’t even make DCMP. This was certainly not an outcome we had predicted given the perceived robot capabilities at the start of the season, but a combination of reliability issues and extremely bad luck ended our run at Sammamish in Week 4. This left the media team scrambling to essentially reset all of our recap video plans for 2023. In this shuffle, we swapped around a bunch of soundtracks and had to cut Loyal by ODESZA from the shortlist for a second year in a row. We’ll use it one year, I swear.
As for GPK’s recap itself, the intro says it all. We had lackluster performance so all we could do was pull some movie magic and hope it would look okay. Glacier Peak 2023 was an event to forget.
Production Hours: We condensed our recap production system a lot this year, reducing turnaround times to just about 1 day (I’m getting really fast at recap editing). GPK took up about 30 hours of our time. 20 for shooting, and 10 in post-production.
Sammamish Event Recap
This is one that actually had good footage. Despite our robot being possessed by some kind of voodoo demon during playoffs, we managed to get some really nice game footage during Qualification Matches and were able to put together a pretty good recap in the end. Attention by NewJeans was originally meant to be our DCMP pick, but it was advanced into the Sammamish slot since we didn’t qualify.
Production Hours: 35 hours - 20 shooting, 15 post-production
Offseason Robot Showcase
This is pretty much just a reel with reveal and Sammamish event footage combined for our offseason competition applications like Chezy Champs. It’s nothing too special, but I do particularly like the motion graphics in this one.
Production Hours: 15 hours in post-production (since footage already existed)
2022 Offseason: Girls Generation Recap
This one was so much fun to edit - I Ain’t Worried is perhaps the most fun recap soundtrack I’ve picked out so far and the post-production process for this event went incredibly smoothly. We don’t have anything particular to say about this reel except that we really like it for some reason.
Production Hours: 40 hours - 20 shooting, 20 post-production
2022-2023 Recruitment Reel
We found an edit using just the middle beat drop section of this soundtrack and decided on a whim that we wanted to make something with it. So we did. It was both very painful and very fun, and helped improve our After Effects capabilities a ton. This is the reel that largely sparked our more motion graphics-heavy approach to video editing that you saw in 2023.
Production Hours: Quite frankly, I don’t remember too well since I worked on this reel on and off across about a 2 month timespan, but my guess would be in the 50 hour range.
Total 2023 Hours: Our Media Department put in approximately 1250 hours on production in the 2022-2023 production year (April 2022 - April 2023)
Final Thoughts
My 4 years in FRC media has honestly made me realize more about the tragic nature of FRC media than anything else. I honestly don’t like to spread negativity, but one of my biggest gripes with FRC media is the lack of any upward mobility. Access to field-side for recording is incredibly limited and most of the time does not exist, and the FRC season is set up in a way that actively suppresses media production efforts due to the lack of built-in media days (which most other sports contain) and the generally tight schedule for the build season and at events. Not just that, but it almost feels like HQ is actively discouraging us from creating amazing content. What happened to the Adobe Digital Licenses as a part of the kickoff kit? What happened to interesting and creatively unique season/game themes? 2018-2020 saw incredible ideas with a true creative identity that were promptly dropped in 2022 and onward. As I spend more time in the field, I realize why many of my more experienced peers dropped FRC quickly to pursue other media-related endeavors. I stayed true to FRC (somewhat naively) due to my interests in engineering and robotics, but some days I quite honestly do wish I had followed a similar exit route and made more progress in a different field. I do enjoy pioneering media tech in FRC, however, and don’t regret what I’ve done in the last 4 years. If anything, I hope to have made large enough of a mark to start a shift in FIRST’s mentality towards media accessibility. Maybe I’ll come back in 10 years to a flourishing community of FRC creatives with not only an ambition, but a realistic route to achieve their ambitious visions.
That being said, my complaints are most likely one in a million as most people exist in this program to build robots, not take pictures and videos. I just wanted to put it out there as sort of a reassurance to any up-and-coming FRC media creatives: this program is not designed to make your job easy. If you’re making anything at all, you’re already doing more than FIRST wants you to. If you ever feel like you’re not making progress, know that you are capable and worthy. As creatives, our job is to work around limitations presented to us, no matter how annoying or inconvenient they may be. You’ll find a way, I promise.
Anyways, that’s all from me for now - there might be some activity here and there as we release some Proguide videos this summer covering more Reveal 2023 and editing content, but I won’t be making any more big write-ups like this. That’ll be up to the next team of 2976 media department leaders to create.
It’s been a fun 4 years, guys.
