FIRST Volunteers: Meet Nick Burgart
August 19, 2020
Blog authored by Collin Fultz and Rachel Moore
February 7, 2025: Edited blog to add thanks to the award sponsor and judges.
This year’s Digital Animation Award was open to teams from both FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition. Thanks to AutomationDirect.com for sponsoring this award, and thanks to Theory Studios for providing the expert feedback to the winning teams! Today, we’re excited to announce the winners from both programs!
FIRST Tech Challenge
First Place
- Team: 21460 – Williston Robotics, Williston, ND USA
- Judges’ Comments: Great job! We were impressed by your use of fluid sims (we know that's not easy). Beautiful lighting, camera moves, composition, and effective storytelling.
Second Place
- Team: 27090 – Quantamania, Mountain View, CA USA
- Judges’ Comments: Very nice job! We were impressed with the 2d hand-drawn style with a great use of color and shading.
Third Place
- Team: 5053 – CART, Orofino, ID USA
- Judges’ Comments: Great work! We were especially impressed by the smoothness of the stop-motion animation.
FIRST Robotics Competition
First Place
- Team: 5468 – Chaos Theory, Bend, OR USA
- Judges’ Comments: Very well done! We were blown away by the professional lighting and color grading, and we loved the stylistic 2D animated overlays. An all around very cohesive, polished animation with a cute story and beautiful visuals.
Second Place
- Team: 1197 – TorBots, Torrance, CA UA
- Judges’ Comments: Great job! We loved how the camera animation moved to the beat of the music. Fantastic use of color. Very stylish.
Third Place
- Team: 293 – SPIKE, Pennington, NJ USA
- Judges’ Comments: We were especially impressed with the fluid 2D animation and well-paced storytelling.
A full playlist of all of the submissions can be found on YouTube for FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition. Videos that are marked as “Made for kids” cannot be added to playlists on YouTube. So, if your animation isn't present in the playlist, please make sure it's marked as "No, it's not made for kids" under the video settings and send an email to animationawardsubmission@automationdirect.com for the video to be added to the playlist.
Congratulations to all the teams on fantastic submissions!