FIRST Robotics Competition 2024 Digital Animation Winner

This award, sponsored by AutomationDirect, celebrates the art of digital animation and its close relationship to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics).

The 2023 Digital Animation Award is offered to help encourage students to cultivate skills in design and creation of animation including, but not limited to, storytelling, creativity, use of computer software, and an understanding of different techniques and forms of animation. This award is open to all FIRST Robotics Competition teams.

This Year’s Theme: Crescendo!!

The 2024 challenge: Create an animation of “Crescendo” that celebrates your FIRST experience.

Reference: 2024 Submission Guidelines

2024 Winner: Team 3100: The Lightning Turtles

Judge Comments: We were honestly blown away across the board – extremely well done. We loved the cohesive visual style, design, smooth animation, camera movements, every thing.

Special Thanks to Theory Studios for doing the Judging again this year! Theory is an international team of animators and special effects artists.

This year, we would also like to recognize our 2nd and 3rd placed teams:

2nd: Team 1197, TorBots

We loved the cute, clever story, cohesive style, and solid character animation. Also, great use of depth of field to direct the viewer’s focus.

3rd: Team 122 – The NASA Knights

Great set building, lighting, and camera movement – and we LOVED the very on-the-nose story.

The judges also asked us to pass the following comments along for some of their favorite animations because they all started where you are and remember how much they valued constructive critique along the way (these are team number order, not ranking order).

FRC Team 75 Awesome style, color palette, and very well done with the painterly 2d animation

FRC Team 1086 – Reaching the Queso-endo Great character style, good use of smear frames in the animation, and we loved the cheese puns

FRC Team 2554 Crescendo in Caretaking Well done telling a cohesive story, and great job with the lighting and rendering

FRC Team 3341 Great storytelling, foreshadowing, and follow-through with the story through composition. Also, well done on the cute style

FRC Team 4717 Westerner Robotics Very cool animation – we loved the style with the 2d face animation on the 3d characters, and the robot dragon was awesome!

FRC Team 7459 – Taubatexas Great job with the motion design, interesting 2d style, and the story

FRC Team 9175 Well done telling a tight story with beautiful style and lighting

Past Winners and Animations

2023 Winner (Team 3100) — All 2024 Submissions

2023 Winner (Team 836) — All 2023 Submissions

2022 Winner ( Team8334) – – All 2022 Submissions

2021 Winner ( Team8592 ) – – All 2021 Submissions

2020 Winner (Team 1317 ) – – All 2020 Submission

2019 Winner (Team 846) – – All 2019 Submissions

2018 Winner (Team 1317) – – All 2018 Submissions

2017 Winner (Team 1317) – – All 2017 Submissions