We are excited to announce the theme for the 2024 Safety Animation Award sponsored by UL Solutions: Safety – Full STEAM Ahead!
Engineering is synonymous with creativity. When communicating the need for safe behavior and practices, the most effective messaging is often the most creative. If we truly want to encourage safe behaviors, making messages creative and connecting them to our emotions makes the messages more memorable. Creativity and inspiration can come from anywhere.
For the 2024 Safety Animation, we challenge teams to encourage safe practices by tapping into their creativity and influencing emotions and actions. The winning animations will allow the most creative members of your teams to share their talents. Stun us with your stimulating visuals, build a crescendo with your original soundtracks, and influence us to be safe with your poetic words. Engage the senses and make safety memorable!
UL Solutions will provide restricted grants to the Winner and Finalists. The Winner will receive $500 and each of the two Finalists will receive $250 towards registration in 2025. Thank you, UL Solutions!
Teams can check out the details about the Safety Animation Award criteria as well as the 2024 Safety Manual on the FIRST ® Robotics Competition Safety page. Be sure to read through this manual for important safety information, as it provides a basic set of requirements to maintain a safe environment during the build season, at competition events, and throughout everyday life!
UL Solutions and FIRST Safety Learning Portal
And don’t forget that team members can take online safety training to enhance your team’s safety program on the UL Solutions and FIRST Safety Learning Portal. This training is designed to complement a team’s current safety program by providing more in-depth training on the following topics:
Safety Manual Training
Fire Extinguisher and Safety Awareness
Hand and Power Tool Safety Awareness
Hazard Communication – Safety Data Sheets
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Awareness
Recognizing Electrical Hazards Awareness
Lockout/Tagout Awareness
Hearing Conservation Awareness
As we ramp up for the upcoming season, remember: Safety FIRST!
For teams that do the Safety Animation–what software do you use? Our team is always interested in doing this but we don’t know where to start. We’ve got talented artists on the team—they just haven’t done animation before.
We are using Blender and you’d be hard pressed to find a reason to use anything else. I highly advise against using anything else as alternatives like Maya and zBrush are extraordinarily hard to teach and learn due to the lack of community mods, well developed guides, and resources. If you’ve got a team already trained in Maya or the like then go for it but I’d recommend to use Blender.
Edit; The above is for 3D animation, for 2d animation my best recommendations are procreate dreams (very cheap), adobe animate (monthly cost, hard to learn), toonboom, (better than adobe animate and very similar). If you want to go for it Blender has amazing 2D functionality, and you can make 2D characters and objects in 3D environments look amazing with the parallax effect. If you want, Maya has 2D animation but it’s age shows a lot and there’s better alternatives.
Procreate dreams isn’t coming out until November and only for iPad. Can possibly be a helpful 2D animation tool next year.
Animate would be the easiest for Adobe but character animator and after effects could work depending.
If I remember correct, opentunez works like animate but is free.
Our team is using Adobe Animate and I think It is really good for doing 2D animation if you don’t want to do blender. I will be honest right now, blender is a really hard program to learn.
I’d guess the lowest bar for entry for this would be stop motion animation.
Admittedly I doubt anyone would go to the effort required for Coraline but you can do some really cool stuff with it regardless.
And 3d printing has just made it easier.
I agree, Blender IS hard to learn IF you are self-taught. With a good teacher/local instructor or buying a few courses online for less than 50 bucks you can learn it in less than a week. I’ve taught people the software in one in a half to two weeks but to learn it by myself took years. Anyone trying to learn the software should contact local colleges and animation studios/hobbyists for a good instructor to teach them and should shill the couple of bucks for a professional course you can find online to save you months of time. It’s 110% worth it, as the abilities you gain with animation, composing, and creating fantastic scenes is a great feeling, and the skills easily translate to other softwares like Maya or Zbrush for professional studios.
I’ve used adobe animate extensively before and when I was using it it was really unreliable and buggy but it will get the job done and when it works it works phenomenally and has a great feature set. Last time I used Animate was 2 years ago so take this with a grain of salt.
From my experience, no. Within a few weeks of inconsistent learning online I could create some very visually pleasing renders. I never got into animation as I dont really use Blender anymore, but just know that it doesnt take much effort or time to learn. I would reccomend starting with Blender Guru’s donut tutorial if you want to learn the basics. If it’s boring you too much, you should transition into working on a project that engages you more since you will likely find a lot more satisfaction in working on a project you like. Just learn the basics before breaking out. Otherwise, you will miss important tools and processes that could both speed up your workflow and produce better results
Hey everyone, this is the first time I’m starting a forum on this page but I would like to discuss the theme of this year’s Safety Animation.
First off, I would like to start by discussing what Ashley meant when saying the “Theme” was gonna be this year, stated next. It really confused me because he or she didn’t really give a great explanation of what the goal was here.
(Ashley Marie Johnson, October 3rd, 2023)
“We challenge teams to encourage safe practices by tapping into their creativity and influencing emotions and actions.”
If you have any Idea about what this topic means please let me know! It may also help other teams if they are having the same problem that we are facing.
I think this year’s description is kinda confusing. We’ve interpreted “full steam ahead” as robots going fast and how to keep the fast robots safe. For the quote you said we’ve interpreted it as having a cool and creative “theme” to the video and suggesting creative ways to keep safe and having creative/unique animations.
Brian, our team’s animator for the past few years (now a film and animation student at RIT), tried out a few different tools but settled on using Blender for the 2023 season. It does require quite a bit of practice and experience but it is also very powerful. I believe that he did his final edits in either Adobe Premiere Pro (safety animation) or DaVinci Resolve (digital animation). That workflow worked out well enough for him!