The LigerBots FIRST® 2017 Safety Animation Award submission is ready!

These 40 second animated videos are created by students from many FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC) teams each year for the FIRST® Safety Animation Award. They combine an educational message about safety with fun art and animation. The winning ones, deemed by the judges at FIRST® to be the best, get to be shown on a big screen at the beginning of FRC competitions! A couple of LigerBots spent dozens of hours using 3D computer animation software to create our video, which has a steampunk theme. We hope that our submission will be chosen by FIRST® and that it will have a lasting impact the community.

This is the LigerBots’ 3rd year submitting a video for the award. Our biggest challenge this year was a new animation technique. Our student animators from previous years used stop motion, a technique where many images are taken of physical models, such as playdough, or paper cutouts. This year we used 3D animation computer software which proved to be a vastly different process. Computer generated imagery need to be rendered, or drawn out by the computer. Render time was a challenge because of the award submission deadline. And this can take many many hours of valuable time! Despite these challenges, our animation team finished before the deadline and we are all very proud of our unique end result.