Here is our animation submission for 2010. We hope you enjoy it.
Wow. Nice idea, nice finish. I like it a lot - care to make it a reality?
Well done animation and a great idea. Given the topic of your animation, if you haven’t seen it yet you should take a look at the book The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. A great story about someone looking at the utilization of simple, easy-to-construct windmills from the other side of the equation - the builder/user. I found William Kamkwamba’s story to be very FIRST-like, in terms of both his ability to put things to use doing jobs for which they were never originally designed, and (more importantly) his skillful innovation and ability to see a solution to a tough problem. We are giving copies of the book to each of our team captains this year.
-dave
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Dave:
Thanks for the kind words. I went to the link you suggested about the book. It definitely will be added to our library and shared with students.
Thanks
I really like your animation. Unlike my team, who i think tried to put to much duologue into 30 seconds, you animation is both simple and elegant. I also liked how you used your intro slide to present your devise to the viewer, so they already have a general grasp of your concept.
Your textures and models were good, but they seemed a little flat. For example, in your supermarket scene, using the ambient occlusion special effect in the architecture design material or using an ambient occlusion pass would help define your model and add realism.
Your lighting was also good and consistent, but your shadows were pretty dark. You could try to use a fill light (a spot light with the shadows turned off) to simulate ambient light bouncing off your scene (since global illumination and final gather are beasts!)
As I said before, your duologue was amazing and powerful because of the emotional content. Your music also help unify your presentation. Your concept was also appealing because of the grass roots side of it.
You should pay a little more attention to detail: your clock does not flow linearly; your wind turbine would not work because neither side would have more drag over the other; you said at first that 2 children died, then in your credits, you say 3. It seemed that every key frame was set to tangent or auto smooth, even if it was not appropriate (fix that in the curves tool box).
You also use decent character animation and found creative solutions to the limitation of your rig.
All together, it was great and I learned a lot. Good luck at your regionals and at nationals. 
It is great to see the improvement year to year on the team and this year’s animation is the best I have see.
From a retired mentor
Great job Team!
Very nice guys! :] Great Idea too! I believe that one of your mentors’ avatars is the topic of our animation. Lightning, and harnessing its power. Yours reminds me of ours a little: very simple, fitting music, and great pace. You have a LOT more animation than we do though. Our whole animation is one scene with 2 lightning strikes and a bar moving up while the camera is moving the whole time. But you make it look nice! Its not too busy, and very appealing to the eye!
One thing I would say as a minor critique would be the starts and stops in your animation. I would recommend using the curve editor to allow the objects to move more fluidly in the beginning of each scene. Max makes things by default accelerate and decelerate at the beginning and end. A few simple edits in the curve editor would make things a lot more smooth. Il post ours on here when we put it up on our web site.
I know that voice! Its Spoerk! HI SPOERK!
Good job on the animation. I like the way you combined two ideas.