I’m getting in front of the camera now, explaining the Screening Day. Join here!

Just wanted to share a short film I just finished on an abandoned rocket site in the Everglades. It was built by Aerojet in 1963 in an attempt to get the contract to build the rockets for the Apollo mission, but when the deal never happened they shut up the plant.

They did test a few rockets, built in a 150 foot deep silo. The rocket is still there, never removed.

It was a very creepy and surreal place – like something out of Lost. But a very bizarre piece of history in the space race, and a total environmental disaster in the damage it caused.

If anyone’s interested let me know and I can elaborate way further on the history of the site.

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.

Starbot is pretty much the nerve center of robotics in South Florida. It’s a center that focuses on enabling high schoolers to create whatever they can imagine. Though it’s usually robots, I’ve seen student work on go-karts, R/C cars, art projects, and even a camera dolly (ok, that was me during some down time).

An independent, non-profit organization, it’s great because even if you’re a student at a school that doesn’t have a machine shop (like most schools), you still have the opportunity to get involved with robotics and other cool programs. They even offer a large amount of classes, from welding and mill work, to design methodology and marketing.

Find out more about Starbot by checking out their website.

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.

Check out the latest Short Bit above, featuring a short but awesome battle between college robots Witch Doctor and Fuchsia Fusion (which was a former Carrollton robot that competed against Teenager in 2009).

I’m setting a goal of releasing a new video every Tuesday, creatively titled Bots High Tuesday. But I’ll be posting them on Facebook first, followed by all the other channels on Wednesday. So if you want to see them as soon as they’re online, become a fan of Bots High on Facebook.

Bots High Combat Robotics Documentary – Trailer #1 from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

Here’s the latest trailer for Bots High. Kind of an extended teaser, but more epic than the original teaser. Plus you get introduced to the main teams.

Editing is wrapping up and festival deadlines are approaching. I’ll try to post a recap of how the editing process went. And stay tuned for more videos!

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)

Robot Building Time – Time Lapse Montage from Joey Daoud on Vimeo.

For the past few weeks I’ve been filming time lapse shots of teams building their robots. I set the camera to take one picture every second and when you play it back you get a lot of time condensed. It’s cool to watch stuff built really quickly.

This could very well be a part 1 of 2 as there will only be much more robot building in the week leading up to competition.