It was one o’clock in the morning, and the screen from Shawnee Halander’s (11) iPad illuminated the pitch-dark room around her in a white fluorescent hue. Drawing digital drones, rabbits, and slippers had become part of her nightly routine.

Halander had entered the international First Robotics Digital Animation competition on behalf of Option 16. She spent many late nights alone drawing, coloring and animating her short video. As the only member of the robotics animation team at Westview, she independently competed against other high schools and their groups of student animators.

“The process was significantly more difficult last year on my own. There was just so much work to be done,” Halander said. “(The mentors last year) just kind of let me do anything I wanted to do, which was fun. But it’s also isolating, and I liked it a lot more this year when I had a team.”

But this year was different. Now she had 3 other students working with her to create their submission, Gabrielle Poncey (11), Zoey Lestyk (10), and Helena Shi (10).
The competition theme, “Charged Up” challenged the teams to make 30-second video clips to inspire positive change. Halander’ team decided to focus their video on recycling, solely using Procreate and Adobe Premiere Pro to animate it.

Poncey said they began drafting the plan for their animation on Dec. 4. Having only a month and 16 days to complete it proved to be their biggest obstacle.

“I’d say [We worked for] eight hours, for two days leading up to the deadline,” Poncey said. “It really stressed me out at first because I was worried we would lose all the hard work we put into the animation if anything happened during editing.”

The 30-second video consisted of 360 frames, 12 hand-drawn frames per second of art. Shi described enjoying the drafting process, but could barely tolerate the pain of coloring frames.

“A cool part of the drawing process was experimenting with new character designs or perspectives,” Shi said. “[But] my hand felt like it was breaking every time that I colored. It was my wrist and fingers in pain from drawing the same repetitive drawings over and over.”

Despite the challenges, Lestyk said having the support of a group motivated her to persevere, even after the initial excitement of a new project had worn off.

“I’ve had small animation projects that I did just for fun in the past, and those were often abandoned or left half-finished because of lack of motivation,” Lestyk said. “In the end, it was really rewarding to see [this] finished and all put together.”

For Lestyk, participating in First Robotics Competition meant a chance to steer her future toward the engineering field. Through the animation process she got the opportunity to work with people in her desired field.

“We’re working with people who are actually in the industry and can teach us,” Lestyk said. “The mentor for the business department of Westview Robotics is also a graphic designer for the skincare company, Proactiv.”

Completing the animation was a long and multi-step process.

“We first brainstormed and compiled those ideas in a storyboard,” Halander said. “[Then we] made samples of lineart and coloring to determine which style to use, made sketches, did lineart, colored, and then all the clips were edited in Adobe Premiere Pro.”

The team used roles to make the processes easier Poncey mostly colored, Shi colored and drew motion animation, and Halander and Lestyk were largely in charge of drawing the lineart.

“The reason we decided on roles is to make sure that we were consistently using the same style throughout the entirety of our animation,” Poncey said.

From career pursuits to school pride, all four members of the team poured their time and effort into making this video. Once they were done, they posted the finished animation, titled “FRC 3341 Digital Animation 2022-2023” to WVRobotics Option16 Youtube channel.

The team ended up scoring a second-place win in the competition. Shi said this along with finishing the animation in the first place made all their hard work worthwhile.

“The most rewarding part was definitely finishing the animation and winning second place,” Shi said. “I’m glad to say that our hard work has paid off after those hours of torment. In the end, I’m glad we pulled through together.”

Halander said she feels that the team’s hard work and perseverance are what pulled them through to victory. Without the drive they brought to their work, they wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as they were.

“It’s a really good team dynamic and all of us are very passionate about art and making the animation,” Halander said. “They all did a really good job, even despite some of the challenges we faced along the way. I’m really glad for the team that I had, all of them.”