Cal Poly universities’ Stargrazers float that brings to life a scene from the classic Mother Goose rhyme “Hey diddle, diddle” received the Animation Award at the 133rd Rose Parade held New Year’s Day.
The honor, announced two hours before the start of the parade, recognizes the most outstanding use of animation, said Regina Chapuis, the Cal Poly SLO team president. It’s the first time that the schools earned the designation since the award names were changed in 1984. “That’s all the moving parts on our float and also how that meshes with all the other parts,” she said. “How it meshes with the deco, how the concealments from design work with those animations to make them look smooth and fluid and put on a show for the parade.
“It’s really exciting and for me personally, working in electronics the past few years, to see that the animation team and how far they’ve come. I’m really proud of them and for the program as well. That’s really awesome to see that a bunch of us college students can go and make an animation performance that is on par and in this case better than a lot of the professional floats.”
The entry aims to exemplify the parade’s 2022 theme of “Dream. Believe. Achieve.” — a celebration of education’s ability to open doors, open minds and change lives.
Stargrazers mixes the whimsy of the nursery rhyme with the hardworking atmosphere of a polytechnical university campus, with colleges dedicated to engineering and agriculture among other disciplines. As the float traveled the 5½-mile-long parade route, the audience learned the answer to how “the cow jumped over the moon.” It was by jet propulsion.
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