By popular request, I’m posting the raw video from fights I shot at BotsIQ 2011 (and 2010, the competition in the film). Teams like to analyze the fights frame by frame to see what happened.

Right now I’m posting El Cholo and Fluffy DeLarge fights. If you have any requests, email me.

I know it’s been a while with the videos, but the good thing about unedited fights is they’re super easy to do! I’m only putting them on YouTube, so watch the Bots High Channel for future fights.

This has been online for a few weeks, I just forgot to post it on the blog (which is why you should like Bots High on Facebook, because there’s where I post everything first).

It’s from the 2011 BattleBots IQ tournament, which happened last month. 120 lb. open division – last year’s champ Witch Doctor vs. Grasshopper, Jim Smentowski’s robot, who also did BattleBots champ Nightmare. He also runs Robot MarketPlace.

The first video I posted was more of a teaser – the raw footage from Sir Cam-a-bot, my Flip camera crash house. I died laughing when I watched it – it’s like something from a cartoon.

The first video of the full fight was shot in slow motion at 60 fps.

Get all the videos on YouTube.

One of the biggest elements in Bots High is featuring girls build robots and involved in fields that statistically you don’t usually see them in – science and engineering. Two of the three featured teams are all-girls teams (My Mechanical Romance and Mechanical Misfits), and girls play important roles on the other teams as well.

This Short Bit is a clip straight from the film, featuring young girls starting to build robots and Elizabeth and Danielle’s experience in competing at national competitions and being one of the few girls there. It also explains the importance of engineers.

This little sequence above has turned into one of my favorite parts of the film. When I got to Texas for sound designing, they said “We have an idea,” and suggested adding an announcer to this sequence. Coincidentally, the head of the sound studio is also a voice actor and has one of these epic voices.

I was a little hesitant to add a narrator, but he recorded it anyways and I was convinced. Add the campy sound effects and rock music and we’ve got an epic sequence.

I recorded a lot of video of the recording and sound design of this. Check back for it soon.

Tomorrow – off to New York to color time the film! More soon!

Well the BotsIQ competition came and went in a blazing two days. While that wrapped up most of the filming for the documentary (with a few post-competition interviews left) there’s still a long road ahead in first sorting all the footage, and then editing it all. As I go through stuff I’ll be posting more clips.

In the meantime here’s a cool shot Sir Cam-a-bot (more info coming soon) caught inside the arena. Witch Doctor was a beast.

(I post lots of updates on the Facebook Page, which trickles down to Twitter. Keep updated there)

Just finished lighting the arena. I’ve been helping build it since Saturday. It’s a beast.

I’ve also found myself living on the roof of the arena for the past few days too. I think I might have been a cat in another life, hoping from beam to beam.

Early registration starts tomorrow. Then more registration. Then the battles. It’ll be insanity meets awesomeness. And it’s National Robotics Week! Let the fun begin!

Bots High – Robotics Documentary – Teaser Trailer from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

We’re about 4 weeks away from the grand finale – the National High School BattleBots Championship. So far I’ve mostly been filming everything myself, but this time I’m bringing in more crew, more cameras, more epicness – to do things right and make sure everything is covered.

However, the epicness does not come cheap, which is why I started a Kickstarter project. Basically Kickstarter is a cool way to fund projects where people pledge money to reach a goal, and that money is only deducted from your account if the project is fully funded.

So the project is to raise funds to film the championship with multi-cameras, and also to travel to San Francisco to film the regular BattleBots competition, which has an open class where some of the high school teams will compete. Plus I want to interview the cool people out in SF.

So please check out the Bots High Kickstarter page and consider becoming a backer. Like PBS, there’s different rewards for different levels. You can get a DVD, poster, t-shirt, associate producer credit, and all sorts of other stuff.

Thanks for your support (I need it)!

Bots High Teaser Trailer from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

It’s probably not the best to call this a trailer, since I really have no idea how the film will shape up (though I’m 90% sure Flamin’ Fluffy will be in it), but this played in the trailer section of the Borscht Film Festival, so I’m calling it a trailer.

It’s more of a good highlight reel of all the action at Mayhem in Miami. It even includes foreshadowing!

YouTube and blip.tv links.

The Explosive End of Fluffy from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

The first Miami BattleBots competition went off this past weekend. As you can see in the video, I don’t think you could have asked for a more spectacular ending.

Stay tuned for some more videos from the competition.

This past Sunday was a task competition at the Miami Science Museum. A ring is filled with 10 red and 10 blue balloons, and the task is to design a robot to pop an assigned color, plus a white balloon on the back of your opponent, while preventing yours from being popped.

While this isn’t the main focus of the documentary, it was still a lot of fun and lots of the teams that participated have or will be building robots for BattleBots.

The top two teams were from Columbus. Actually, they were the same team and decided to split their odds and build two robots. Seems to have paid off.

The team in third place has one of the best stories. They’ve only been doing robotics for a few months, beginning from a workshop held over the summer (I feel bad, I forgot what school they’re from).

Here’s a video from a camera I stuck in the heart of BatBot, made by Mechanical Misfits:

Bot Cam on Bat Bot from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

And here’s a stylized video from a match shot in slow motion:

Robot Dance in Slow Motion from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

The robot with the syringes ended up coming in first place, while the other robot came in third.

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